The most recent anniversary cruise was a short 5 nighter to Hobart - which is one of our favourite cruise destinations. This cruise was also special as it was our first trip ever on Ovation - and hopefully not our last.
Another thing I should mention is that our wedding anniversary is also Trent's birthday haha so I stole that day from him.
CRUISE EVE
Like most of our cruise journeys, we like to arrive in Sydney the night before and stay in Circular Quay which is an easy walk to the Overseas Passenger Terminal where all Royal Caribbean ships depart from. We always budget for this in our 'holiday'. This cruise we booked at the Holiday Inn The Rocks which I think cruisers would recognise and know well. We arrived fairly early as I had a whole day planned for Trent for his Birthday.
Stroll across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Milsons Point
A ferry ride to Darling Harbour
Watching some Cricket on the HUUUUUGE screen and lunch in Star Casino
Uber back to the Hotel
Evening Stroll around Circular Quay
Dinner at the Four Frogs Creperie
We were both exhausted as we walked over 17,000 steps according to my fitbit
CRUISE DAY
The next morning we woke up at 5am so we could watch the massive ship cruise into port, we planned to walk up to the Pool Deck - but it doesn't open until 6am! Boooooo! So we had to watch from our window.
We did our regular cruise day ritual which includes getting lots of photos from in and around Circular Quay and usually another visit to the Four Frogs Creperie haha.
BOARDING
Oh My Gosh - Boarding this massive beauty was a really smooth process, they were sticking to boarding times though, and different to most Royal Caribbean ships, you actually pre book your boarding time through the cruise log in on the RC website. All of the boarding questions are done in the under cover area of the OPT, not up the escalators like usual. All up it was about 7 minutes from meeting the check in staff to being on board.
TIME FOR FUN
Once we were onboard we went for a small walk and then to the 270 lounge as I knew there would be food and probably not as busy as the Wind Jammer can be on Boarding Day. We connected our devices to the WIFI - which is free to run the Royal IQ App which is where you do all of your booking for Shows, IFly, North Star, Escape Room etc - and we booked all the shows, the North Star and the Escape Room which were not available to pre book through the Cruise Planner desktop version. Oh and Make sure you download the Royal IQ app at home on a better Wifi connection, as it takes ages to do onboard using the free access which seems only strong enough to use the app, not to download it.
North Star was interesting, we managed to go to a session on boarding day that you didn't have to prebook for, a walk up version, so we were the first session to go up for the day and got to see a very different view of Circular Quay, we were lucky we did this in the end as our other session at sea was cancelled due to unsafe conditions on deck.
IFly was also cancelled due to unsafe conditions. However, be aware that there is a weight limit to this which is about 115kgs and also a height restriction so in the end Trent wouldn't have been able to do this anyway!
Escape Room, I understand that in the escape room you work as a team with randoms to solve all the clues. When we turned up there were many non English speaking people and mostly teenagers so we ended up walking away planning to do the Escape room on our next Ovation cruise instead.
Definitely arrive early for all of your booked shows, as the lines can be long and abit confusing as people on 'stand by' end up blocking the access and you can't figure out where to go if you have booked.
CALORIES
The food options on Ovation were amazing and in 5 nights we couldn't sample them all.
Our Dinner booking was in Chic - which is 1 of 4 Main Dining options on board. You will be automatically allocated 1 of the 4 restaurants or book from 2 of them if you are My Time Dining. I actually found the smaller dining room much more relaxed than traditional cruising and they were not strict on the dress code in our experience.
We also ate lunch at the Wind Jammer, Snacks and lunch at 270 lounge, Lunch at Vintages Tapas - which is a smaller menu from Jamie's Italian next door and Make your own Pizza at Sorrentos.
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| Food from Vintages Tapas |
PORT
There was only one port on this journey and we were lucky enough to spend two amazing days there - HOBART - it is one of our favourite cruise ports it is such a small beautiful city with plenty for us to do, many bars and restaurants and lots of history. I can highly recommend the Horse Drawn carriage tour of Hobart, the horses are beautiful and well looked after. We are yet to experience MONA in all off our trips there, but our upcoming cruise in a few weeks includes a ferry ticket to MONA so we will finally be able to check it out. We also can't visit Hobart without catching up with our lovely cruise buddies!
Feel free to post any questions you have about Ovation and I will do my best to answer them.
Happy Cruising :)
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