Now for the ship itself:

Passengers: Holds between 2500-3000 passengers & about 1000 crew.

Dining options: There was the Main Dining Room, which we rarely ate at as there were some odd combinations. (Steak with caramelised pineapple anyone? Fish with apricots anyone?) We spent a fair bit of time at the Lido Market, which was like every other ship’s buffet option except on HAL the staff serve you at each station rather than you helping yourself. IMO that’s a great idea as so many people pile up their plates & then leave food behind to waste. There were also the specialty restaurants, some of which we ate at on the 2nd cruise. (We avoided the sushi place + the French-inspired restaurant.) Out of the 3 we ate at, Pinnacle Grill was the best – the fillet steak we ate on both occasions was melt-in-the-mouth delish. The Asian-fusion Tamarind was meh & Canaletto (the Italian restaurant) was not too bad. The prices for such restaurants were surprisingly decent per head: none of them were over the $25US mark, which is quite good in cruise terms. We’ve paid more on previous cruises for the specialty restaurants.

The food itself: As far as this goes, I was impressed with the food on offer onboard Koningsdam. If you’re a foodie, then HAL is definitely your best bet in terms of cruising. This was the first time I’d ever seen strawberries (and berries in general) so readily available – not just as a garnish with dinner, but available at breakfast (mostly strawberries, but still) & available at the crepe station inside Lido Market. They also had various flavours of ice cream available at the Lido Market, which I indulged in….we soon realised how much Americans love their ice cream as this was the busiest spot at lunch-time. Although there were some repetitive dishes on offer at Lido Market every day/night, I still found that there was enough variety to keep everyone happy.

(One thing I’ll also note here is the drinks packages. We didn’t partake as HAL have a policy whereby if 1 person in a cabin gets a drinks package of some kind, then everybody has to get that same drinks package, regardless of whether they drink alcohol or not. This was going to prove very costly for us – the equivalent of 2 passengers in a balcony cabin on another cruise, you could say – so we abstained as I rarely drink anyway.)

Things to do on-board: This is where I found HAL lacking & where I felt that they truly cater towards the “nearly dead” side of cruising. Aside from the shows (which I rarely go to), there was often only 1 other thing to do of an evening & that was usually music trivia, which we took part in. Sure, there were plenty of bands playing in various spots around the ship & they were popular; but despite being a music lover, I didn’t feel like sitting down of an evening to watch a band, so ended up spending a fair bit of time in the casino doing my dosh at the roulette table. Even during the day I rarely found anything to do as things weren’t on at an ideal time or they required me parting with my money, which I wasn’t willing to do due to the exchange rate & also not being interested in what was on offer.

Shore excursions: As mentioned above, we only did the 1 shore excursion as my Mum had read very bad reviews about HAL’s shore excursions prior to getting on the cruise, so I guess we got scared off by those reviews. In hindsight, we probably could’ve done more things, but when walking into the unknown we tend to err on the side of caution. If we were to do this cruise again, then we’d take advantage of the shore excursions a bit more.

Decor: Our cabin was quite nice & fairly spacious despite having a sofa bed set up of a night-time, which I slept on. (It wasn’t the worst sofa I’ve slept on, but not that great either.) The bathroom was nice & modern, especially compared to Carnival Legend (LOL) & our balcony was spacious enough for the 3 of us. Overall decor on the ship wasn’t bad either – it wasn’t too dark & dingy, but it wasn’t too bright either.

Beauty services: They do have a thermal suite on-board Koningsdam, which wasn’t cheap lemme tell you (they never are, let’s face it). As far as this goes, it was a pretty nice one (this one had a massive hydro pool adjacent to the thermal suite, something I’d never seen before on a cruise ship), but there was at least 1 or 2 features of it that weren’t working for either part of or the entire cruise, which was a shame. I tried to go in there when it wasn’t too busy because of course, some mofos like to have an audible chat in what is meant to be a quiet & tranquil place don’t they? That part about it – fellow humans being total dum-dums – has made me think twice about signing up for another thermal suite package on a cruise again.

I did go to the salon twice on the first cruise to get my hair done for the “gala” (aka formal) nights & my hair was just ok. My poor Mum went & had a haircut & dye job on our final day of the cruise & received a terrible result – the male hairdresser on-board did not know how to cut hair for peanuts & instead trimmed my Mum’s short & somewhat cropped hair like a hedge, using thinning scissors. He also went OTT with the amount of work he did, washing her hair not once but twice & also straigtening (yes, straightening!) her hair, which I’ve never seen anyone do before. The type of colour they used on-board this ship was also terrible – extremely drippy & diluted. My advice? Avoid getting anything major done inside a cruise ship salon & you’ll be fine. (Oh & don’t let them push you into doing or buying anything you don’t wish to do/buy either. Been there, done that on previous cruises, have been burnt as a result.)

I think that’s about all I needed to cover. Let me leave you with a photo of the ship, taken whilst I was in Amber Cove.

I guess it’s high time that I told you all about the cruise I went on late last year!

My folks & I did the 21-night Southern Caribbean Seafarer/Wayfarer back-to-back cruise on Holland America Line’s ship Koningsdam, which is a relatively new ship (it came into sailing back in 2016). We sailed out of Fort Lauderdale in the US both times, going to:

CRUISE 1

• Kralendijk, Bonaire
• Willemstad, Curaçao
• Oranjestad, Aruba
• Amber Cove, Dominican Republic
• Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos
• Half Moon Cay, Bahamas (This is Holland America’s own private island. A number of cruise lines have such islands in the Bahamas – Cococay is Royal Caribbean’s own private island.)

CRUISE 2

• Philipsburg, Sint Maarten (had been there before & thought it was a dump – this time around wasn’t so bad, but then again we just wandered around close to where we’d docked rather than travelling further out)
• Fort-de-France, Martinique (didn’t get off the ship that day & from what I heard, I really wasn’t missing out on much….tbh the view from the ship confirmed that)
• Bridgetown, Barbados (had the best day there, on-board a catamaran, sailing around in the sun, swimming with sea turtles & other sea life, in all the blue water…sigh….)
• Castries, St Lucia
• St Johns, Antigua (We were initially going to go to St Kitts & Nevis instead, but the itinerary changed slightly before we got on-board. Kinda wished we’d got to go there instead as the weather was awful when we arrived in Antigua & the port was rubbish.)
• St Thomas, US Virgin Islands (Had also been there before. I wanted to get out for the day, but the lure of free Wi-Fi inside the info centre was too much for this internet-starved Millenial lol.)
• Half Moon Cay, Bahamas

We mainly did this cruise for the ports & not necessarily the ship itself; although the lure of trying a new cruise line was a bit hard to resist. I’ll talk more about the ship in the next post, but for now I’ll discuss the ports.

As far as I’m concerned, the best port was Barbados – my folks & I were in agreement on that. I don’t know if that’s because we decided to do a shore excursion (it was the only one we did on the cruise – more on that later), or whether it was because we genuinely had a good day & cut loose etc, but it was a fantastic day.

Will come back to this later as I’m getting distracted by the TV….

EDIT: Here’s a photo of a beach I went snorkelling at in Barbados. You’ll understand why I loved the place once you view this…

Thanks for the info on your cruise Seashells it sounds amazing, I’d love to go to St Kitts as one of my ancestors was born there. (Maybe I could actually find out who her parents were!) Shaper hopefully you’ll get away on a cruise later this year, so good that you had travel insurance and you received a refund.

We booked a cruise in July last year for a cruise from Fremantle back to Fremantle seeing almost all of South Australia ,Kangaroo Island and Tasmania, we were looking forward t o it as it was going in January 2020 so had a long time to wait. Unfortunately in December my husband got sick and we were unable to travel after all that waiting. Luckily we had taken out travel insurance from a company I found on the net who were much cheaper than others, I thought at the time well I dont suppose they will be paying us out as its so near the time for us to go, but they were so good and helpful and we have just received the full payment back apart from the usual access I would recommend this company to everyone its called Zoom and is backed by Lloyds of London. I cannot stress this enough when your going to travel and have paid a deposit take out your travel insurance immediately,as you never know whats happening in the future. My husband is still not well and seeing a specialist . We love cruising and this would have been our 3rd in 4 years.

Welcome back, Margaret. Pleased you had a good time overall. I hope your knee is actually getting better, much better. It still looks painful.

Sorry for some reason, that’s upside down. I’ve tried to fix it a few times…………
You don’t want to see what my boob and ribs look like. :-/

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I’m back, honeys, slowly getting better. I did have a relaxing time. Unfortunately we hit some bad weather and didn’t manage to dock at Moreton Island, it was just too dangerous. We had some huge swells, I was a bit green for 24 hours, but still had fun considering.

The food, entertainment and relaxing experience was worth it.
We met a lot of interesting people, and had so much fun.
Thank you for everyone’s concern. I am getting better slowly, every day.

Margaret 322 will be on her cruise by now. Oh that did look so painful!

Ouch MARGARET 🙁

You will have plenty of time to relax once you are on there and you won’t have to cook or clean!