Brian Hart
England and Iberia Day 5

england · portugal · spain

England and Iberia Day 5

A sea day and the last of the jet lag

· 9 mins read

  • Start of day: At sea
  • End of day: At sea

Sea day. Since sea days are boring, I’ll use this one to talk about when we scheduled this cruise, and what my feelings are on Celebrity Edge-class ships and their infinite verandas.

Infinite Verandas

This is a Celebrity Edge-class ship. On these ships, there are not a lot of traditional veranda rooms. Instead, Celebrity offers an “Edge Stateroom with Infinite Veranda”.

What is that? A standard veranda room like you might be used to has an outside sitting area with a few chairs and maybe a table, with a door separating inside from out. For the Edge-class of ships, Celebrity has this hybrid inside/outside kind of stateroom. The entire end of the cabin is window, with the entire top part able to slide down.

Here’s a video tour of an Infinite Veranda stateroom.

For sleeping, from the video, note that there’s a bed for one additional person:

A screenshot of the YouTube video 'Celebrity Apex Edge Infinity Veranda Balcony Stateroom Cabin Tour & Review' by the channel TravelTouristVideos, which has 44.6K subscribers. The video frame shows an Edge Stateroom with the sofa converted into a made-up single bed, captioned in white text at the upper left 'Sofa Bed made-up by Room Steward'. The bed carries white sheets, a folded white duvet, and a tan runner across the foot, set against a padded headboard below a framed print of a red abstract form. A wall sconce with a rectangular shade glows beside it, and a grey rug patterned with white rounded rectangles covers the floor. At the right, the infinite veranda's glass wall is open to a darkened evening view, with a woven chair, an ottoman, and a small white side table on the veranda where a seated person in a blue top is partly visible. The YouTube interface below shows Subscribe, 276 likes, and Share, Ask, and Save buttons.

I prefer traditional balconies over these edge veranda rooms, for a few reasons:

  • When you open the giant window, the air conditioning shuts off. From our experience in the Caribbean in January, this means the stateroom gets pretty hot pretty fast. You wanted fresh air but now you’re making the other person in the room accommodate you.
  • Even with the window closed, this part of the room gets pretty warm when in direct sunlight.
  • You can separate the ‘veranda’ from the rest of the room with a full-length curtain, but that doesn’t stop noise, and you still have the AC issue if you also open the window.
  • As far as I can tell, there aren’t any infinite veranda staterooms that also have upper berths. As a parent with two teenagers, two separate beds is strongly preferred over a convertible sofa that sleeps two. In fact, it’s a non-starter for us.
  • Those chairs aren’t all that comfortable.
  • There’s a motor-actuated shade at the window instead of a blackout curtain. This means there’s no peeking your head out to see where you are. You can start to raise the shade… from the bottom… but it’s much less convenient.

The only itinerary where I’d consider an infinite veranda would be Alaska, where more reasonable temperatures and an abundance of scenery play well with this configuration. Otherwise, it’s a pass for me.

Enough about that. For this cruise, we booked it quite late – June 14, with the sailing on August 1. As such, there weren’t many choices for staterooms. By some miracle, I was able to find two oceanviews adjacent to each other on deck 3. Sherri and Siena were already familiar with this cabin configuration from our January cruise, where they liked the layout and the location. We opted for the two cabins so everyone could get a proper bed. We split between me and my son in one cabin, and Sherri and Siena in the adjoining.

We all slept in, still working through the ravages of jet lag. I slept solid from 10pm to 8:30am or so, and yet my Apple Watch1 was convinced I’d had a bad night and was up a few times.

I had a light breakfast at the high-top tables in the back of the buffet with Sherri, and did the same for lunch a bit later. I laid out for a while by myself, and then with Sherri and Siena.

Around 4:30 I went up to Eden to enjoy the view and update this log. We’ll likely do 6pm dinners for the rest of this cruise. There’s no waiting to get into a restaurant at that hour and the service is fast.

A few other random tidbits:

A la carte drink prices are expensive. I haven’t tracked drink prices over time, but $12 for a Bud Light? Or $16 for a Stella? I’ll cover this towards the end of the overall trip report, or perhaps in a separate article, but this was the first cruise where I felt there was an excessive amount of nickel-and-diming.2

A laminated table-tent drinks menu standing on a white tabletop in a glass-walled shipboard venue. The card is headed WINES BY THE GLASS in red, with sections for Sparkling (Champagne, Robert de Pampignac, France 23; Prosecco, Torresella, Italy 14), Rose, White (Pinot Grigio, Santa Margherita, Italy 23; Sauvignon Blanc, Wairau River, New Zealand 23; Chardonnay, Concha y Toro, Chile 14; Riesling, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Washington 14), and Red (Pinot Noir, Meiomi, California 23; Merlot, Columbia Crest, Washington 14; Malbec, Zuccardi, Argentina 14; Cabernet Sauvignon, Silver Ghost, Napa Valley 23). A BEER & OTHERS block lists Heineken 12, Blue Moon 14, Peroni 14, Stella Artois 16, Dos Equis Lager 12, Coors Light 12, Bud Light 12, Corona Extra 12, Stone IPA 16, and Topo Chico Hard Seltzer 13, with fine print noting the classic beverage package does not include all offerings. Two green Heineken bottles are printed alongside. Behind the menu, salt and pepper shakers sit on the table and other passengers are seated at tables beside the windows, with flat blue ocean and sky beyond.

A bit of the view from Eden at the aft:

The theater show Rockumentary was great! Looking down over a packed shipboard theater from the back rows. The round thrust stage in the center is lit in blue and yellow pools of light with a haze of theatrical smoke, ringed by stacked speaker cabinets and scaffolding towers. A large projection at the upper right reads ROCKUMENTARY in red block letters over a collage backdrop. Curved pink and white sculptural panels frame the stage at left, a red LED strip traces the dark ceiling, and an upper balcony level is visible along the left wall. Several hundred seated audience members fill the dark auditorium in silhouette.

And a piece of ship art. Night shot on the pool deck outside the Oceanview Cafe, whose backlit lowercase sign glows above the glass entrance doors at left. The ship's superstructure is washed in deep blue and violet uplighting, with a glass-railed upper deck above. In the center, a large sculpture of a human head rests on a low black plinth -- a pale, weathered, cracked-clay face with heavy-lidded eyes and a closed mouth, lit warmly against the blue. Empty cream lounge chairs sit on the warm-toned teak deck in the foreground, a potted plant stands to the right, and the sky beyond is black.

Footnotes:

  1. The sleep score from my Apple Watch is always a bit dubious. There’s a very loose correlation, I feel, between my score and reality. And I’m convinced there’s something about being on a ship that causes mismeasurement. ↩

  2. My cruise before this was on ultra-luxury line Silversea, which certainly affected my thoughts on this. ↩