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Day 8 Departure Day – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 8 Departure Day – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

It’s our last morning onboard. I’d set the alarm for 6am as our departure slot was scheduled from 07:30 – 07:45.

For breakfast, we thought we would try the Park Cafe, as this is somewhere we had not tried so far on the cruise. When we got there around 06:15 it was fairly quiet. Selections were fairly limited to cereals, fruits and some hot muffins.

For drinks, the juice dispensers had out of…

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Day 7 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 7 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

It’s our last full day on board and we plan to try and make the most of it.

We got up early and went to the Windjammer for breakfast at 7am. At this time it was fairly quiet, although like the other morning there were a lot of contractors there, some of which with beers, as again I assumed they had been working overnight, although not really what you want to see at that time of day.

Breakfast was…

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Day 6 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 6 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

For breakfast we decided to try American Icon again. This is the only option for a la carte breakfast on board the ship, although I believe there may be another option for suite guests.

The queue wasn’t too long this morning with only about a 5 minute wait to be seated. However, once seated the usual slow service we had experienced throughout the week continued.

It took around 25 minutes to…

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Day 5 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 5 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Last night was the final night of the 4 day cruise. Had we have been departing we would have had to have packed our cases and left them outside our cabin by 10pm last night. However, as we are doing a back to back, we received information to confirm that we had to pack our small items in our case by 08:30 and anything hung in our wardrobes could remain which along with our cases would be moved to…

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Day 4 - Royal Caribbean - Harmony of the Seas - Inaugural Sailing

Day 4 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

After a relatively early night, I had decided to set the alarm for 6am, so I could go round the ship and get some pictures / video while it was quiet. However, when it went off it quickly got snoozed till 7am as I was too tired, and after all we’re on holiday so why not have a sleep in?

We left the cabin at just after 7 and the boat seemed very quiet for this time of the morning. When we got to…

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Videos - Royal Caribbean - Harmony of the Seas

Videos – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas

I realise, I’ve not published a post today and they are a couple of days behind, they do take a while to create, especially with all the images in them, so when we have shows and stuff in the day, I don’t get much chance to create them.

However, today I have been editing all the videos I filmed the other day and uploading them to YouTube, with all the deck tours, so I hope you enjoy these. All…

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Day 3 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 3 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Following on from my previous day 2 post, we had a late night so didn’t get up till around 12.

Today we are in port at Rotterdam, although we had no plans to get off the ship in port. Rotterdam is somewhere we have visited before, so we thought we would make the most of the ship whilst it was quiet in port.

We headed to the Windjammer for Breakfast / Lunch and it was the quietest we have ever…

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Day 2 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 2 – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

After a bit of a sleep in, we headed off to breakfast at around 09:30. After looking at the available options we decided to go to American Icon Grill for breakfast.

There were 2 queues one for express breakfast,  and one for a la carte, we opted for the a la carte option.

Both queues were pretty big, and they were shouting out to people recommending that people go to the Solarium Bistro for…

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Day 1 Afternoon / Evening – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

Day 1 Afternoon / Evening – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

After we had accessed our cabin, we went to the On Air bar on deck 5, so I could do some blogging and also edit the video of the cabin, you will have seen on the previous post.

The On Air bar is a karaoke bar, although at the time, there was no karaoke on, but the bar, as with every other bar on the ship was very very busy and it took around 15 minutes to get served. The picture below, is of the…

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Day 1 Boarding / Cabin - Royal Caribbean - Harmony of the Seas - Inaugural Sailing

Day 1 Boarding / Cabin – Royal Caribbean – Harmony of the Seas – Inaugural Sailing

We arrived at the port around 11:30 and you certainly couldn’t miss Harmony, it is huge!

From the taxi drop off point, a porter took our bags and loaded them onto the trolleys / trucks, ready to go onto the ship. I had expected to receive smart luggage tags, like on Anthem, although we were not given any luggage receipts, on this occasion.

Just outside the terminal, there was a pretty large…

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As out cruise is from Southampton and we live in Yorkshire, approximately 230 miles away we had booked a pre cruise hotel, with car parking at the Holiday Inn in Eastleigh, near Southampton.

We had hoped to drive down mid afternoon, although due to a very busy few weeks at work, with no time to pack etc, by the time we had done everything we had needed to do, we left at around 18:15.

The weather…

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Pre Cruise - Royal Caribbean - Harmony Of The Seas - Maiden Voyage

Pre Cruise – Royal Caribbean – Harmony Of The Seas – Maiden Voyage

For those of you who have visited this site before, you may have read my blog on the Anthem of the Seas Transatlantic blog, although that was live on Cruise Critic, then updated on here afterwards.

We have booked for the maiden paying passenger voyage on Harmony of the Seas from 22nd May – 26th May 2016 for 4 nights then back to back on the 3 night from 26th – 29th May 2016.

This site will be…

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Carlton Hotel

In a number of my posts, I have mentioned about the Carlton Hotel where we stayed during our time in Singapore. However, I wanted to give this a post of it’s own with a more in depth review.

We had booked the hotel several months in advance, based on it’s location and facilities. One of the things which attracted us was the ability to book Premier Rooms, which gave a number of additional…

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Singapore – Day 5 (4th January 2016)

Singapore – Day 5 (4th January 2016)

This is our last day in Singapore before our flight out at 19:10, so we wanted to try and make the most of it, but equally not do too much as we had a fair amount of flying to do on our way to Christchurch.

After our breakfast as usual in the Premier Lounge at the Carlton Hotel, we headed down to Suntec City for a bit of shopping. We had got there fairly early, but realised most of the shops…

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Raffles Singapore

As I mentioned in a previous post, we visited Raffles for the obligatory Singapore Sling and the experience. I wanted to give Raffles it’s own post, although it wont be lengthy but will be fairly picture heavy.

Our hotel was directly opposite Raffles so we had a great view of it, including it’s roof top pool from our room.

Before we had been to the Long Bar at Raffles, we had walked around the…

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Singapore - Day 4 (3rd January 2016)

Singapore – Day 4 (3rd January 2016)

After waking up from a slight hangover from the German beers last night, it was time to crack on with the day and make the most of our last full day in Singapore.

The first thing on the agenda today was to go on the open top bus tour around Singapore. For a set price we were able to hop on and hop off number of open top bus routes around the city. All at the same time as same time as getting some…

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Singapore - Day 3 (2nd January 2016)

Singapore – Day 3 (2nd January 2016)

Today’s plan was to go to Universal Studios at Sentosa Island, so after an early breakfast we were on the MRT on our way to Sentosa Island.

There is no MRT on Sentosa, so we headed to HarbourFront, where you can walk through the Vivo City shopping centre to the catch the Sentosa Express on the top floor (Level 3).

As it was still before 9, there was no queue to buy tickets for the Monorail, which…

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