Cruise Announcement - We’re on Norwegian Escape!

You're listening to the Cruise Tips TV Unplugged Podcast. Today, we are announcing our next cruise. Welcome to Cruise Tips TV Unplugged. I'm your host, Sherry, and we invite you to join our cruise loving family as we travel the world creating cruise videos and vlogs. In this podcast, we talk tips, tactics, and strategies to help you make every cruise your dream cruise. Well, this should be exciting. Do I know? No, I know. You know, let it go. This is exciting. You guys, this is a big one. And I don't think most people saw this one coming. But it is going to be a big one. And we're not going to, we're not going to take forever to get to the punchline here. Are we not? By the time this podcast airs, if everything has gone smoothly, and we have, we have a successfully flown to New York without any issues, we will be on Norwegian Escape for a five-night Bermuda cruise. Say what? How cool is this? It's pretty exciting, isn't it? It is. Yeah. Did you know I haven't been to New York since I was eight years old? And New York is a crazy place. It's a wild place. It's a beautiful place. It's big. It's overwhelming, especially if you're like a country girl, like myself. I'm excited to get back over there for a very short time. Our pre-cruised day in New York is a short one. But yeah, we're doing this, you guys. So here's how this all came about. Many of you followed Norwegian cruise line on YouTube and have noticed that they are creating content in partnership with content creators right now. And we were invited by Norwegian to join this project. And it's been months in the works and we're really thrilled to be bringing you guys a whole bunch of content on our channel and Norwegian's channel. So most of it's going to be a surprise. But I will tell you that a full ship tour is coming. It'll be a fun interactive tip-filled ship tour. And of course, a little look at our state room, our balcony, state room on Norwegian. And then some other surprises will be coming as well. That we just cannot wait to share with you. So you might be thinking, hey, guys, we haven't seen you on Norwegian for a while. And that is a fact. We've actually sailed quite a bit with Norwegian pre-pandemic. In fact, junior and I last time we were on Norwegian, we were on Norwegian bliss. Back in, I want to say, oh, dear, whenever the debut was, we were on the inaugural in LA for bliss. And that was wonderful. But Mr. Cruz, his TV and junior and I have actually sailed quite a bit on Norwegian. Out of the west coast, mostly we've been on gosh jewel. Yeah. And star you have a good memory. I'm impressed right now. And we've been on those ships actually multiple times. Most of those cruises were to the Mexican Riviera. So when junior and I went on the inaugural of Norwegian bliss for a couple days, we're pretty wowed because that ship is one of the most beautiful vessels I've ever seen. And of course, you know, it has a lot of fun elements too. You've got the water slides, the go carts and all of that. So when we got the opportunity to go on Norwegian escape, which is one of Norwegian bliss's sister ships are kind of, you know, class sisters. I guess you could say we're pretty thrilled. Our son is very excited for this one. This is definitely a family affair and he is going to be living it up and trying all the things on this cruise. So we're getting pretty excited guys. And again, by the time that you hear this, we should be on the ship. So you're going to want to jump over to Instagram and Facebook, check out our stories, check out our posts. We'll do our very best to capture everything we can in real time. This is always, these things are always contingent upon having a good internet connection as we know, but I'm sure that that will be fine as we head out to Bermuda. It should be a good thing. So Mr. Heres of CV, do you know, I didn't really realize when Norwegian escape was built. I thought that the ship was a little older than it is, but it was actually built in 2015. So it's about eight years old at this point and it is a breakaway plus class ship. So it's, it's sisters are Norwegian bliss, which is the one that I was talking about that has the go-cart track and so gorgeous Norwegian encore. And of course, Norwegian joy. But the difference is that Norwegian escape is actually the only breakaway plus class that doesn't have the racetrack on board, which is okay. I mean, we'll, we're going to survive without a racetrack. There's so many other fun things, but it's, it's a relatively large ship. It's not a massive mega ship. It holds about 4266 passengers, 165,000 gross tons, 1700 crew approximately. So it's big, but it's not the biggest in the world. And you know that we like ourselves a not the biggest ship in the world kind of experience. But it's going to be a good one. And this cruise is going to be focused on five days of eating incredible food and doing all the fun things. So I want to go through some of the highlights here and talk about the dining and talk about some of the activities that are available on this ship. And then of course, you guys are just going to have to tune in and see how it all pans out. But it's going to be hard to do it all in five days. Mr. Cruise of CV. We're kind of kicking ourselves that we chose this five, nine, ten, right? And hindsight, we're like, what are we thinking? We should have done, you know, a seven-nighter and eight-nighter. I think we'll, we'll do okay. Well, because there's quite a few C days going out to Bermuda, I think we're going to be all right. We will figure it out. We will figure it out. We will figure it out. So Mr. Cruise of CV, we start with dining or activities because both of them are like action packed and there's so much to share with people. But which one do you think you want to go with first? What's more exciting to you? Let's go with dining. Dining, should we do it? Okay. All right. So the specialty dining on Norwegian is an absolute highlight. For those of you who have cruised with Norwegian, you might know that they do specialty so, so well. So on this ship, here are some of the restaurants that you've got. You got Cagneys. You guys know the drill, classic steakhouse, Angus beef, really beautiful location. This particular ship, the Cagneys is overlooking the Manhattan room and the ship's wake. I've never been to a steakhouse that looked out of the wake before. Very cool. We're going there. Did you know that? I love it. I love filet mignon. So we're going to be getting some of that. Oh. And they have outdoor seating at that one too. So you can do outdoor seating. You can overlook the ship's wake, whatever you want to do. So great place to go for a steakhouse experience. And then of course, they have Teppanyaki, which if you're cruising as a family, or you just love Teppanyaki, you love Japanese, the absolute best way to go. Kids absolutely adore Teppanyaki. Our son totally loves it. This is one though where if you guys are going on a Norwegian ship, you've got to make sure you book these really well in advance because Teppanyaki, the venues are small and those things are going to fill up. So book it early. And we're going there. I'm like listing all the good stuff. We are Mr. Crucipes TV. We're doing it. We're doing Teppanyaki. Okay. Then next up, this is more your jam, Mr. Crucipes TV. He's not the biggest Teppanyaki fan, but he is a French food fan, Libby Stro, which is in 678 Ocean Place is like the romantic dining place. So we're going to drag Junior to the French restaurant and enjoy that. They also have a La Cucina, which is Italian fare on this ship. And that one also has some outdoor seating on the waterfront. And they have just yummy, delicious Italian food. Then for our absolute, fave Norwegian restaurant. And this one just really never disappoints us. It's Moderna. It's the Churasia, the authentic Brazilian steakhouse. They also have some outdoor seating on the waterfront. And these are the, this is the restaurant where they carve the meat table side. And they have that awesome salad bar. So that's going to be good. And Mr. Crucipes TV, we are going there. So we're doing that one as well. And lastly, they also have Biamo by Ocean Blue. We're not doing this one this time because they're just simply aren't enough nights, but this is a fancy seafood restaurant. And they have grilled fish and things like that, all kinds of different things. So we're doing specialty dining, you guys, pretty much every night. We're also going to do food republic, which is a very cool concept on Norwegian. If you haven't done food republic before, it's really neat. It's something that it's hard to describe to people because it's specialty, but yet you don't generally have to have a reservation to go there. So we're going to do our very best to kind of outline that for you in our videos and in our social posts and kind of tell you a little bit more about it. So you have the, those are all the upcharge specialty spots on escape, but you also of course have the complimentary dining, right? You have the, you have oceans, which is a, it's basically like a free 24 hour restaurant that is pretty rare. Actually, it's very rare to have a 24 hour restaurant and see. So cool. It's like a pub. It's like a pub with food, a pub with food that you can count on at 3 30 a.m. All the time. Yeah, you could go there and get yourself burger and some wings. 3 30 in the morning if you wanted to, but they do, they have breakfast, lunch, dinner, they have nightly specials and stuff and they have, they have a little arcade and oceans do apparently on the ship, which I'm excited to check out. And then they have, they have several main dining rooms. So they have the Manhattan room, they have taste, they have saver and those are basically the main dining room. So Norwegian, as you all know, they do the freestyle dining concept. There's no real set seating times or anything. You can just show up when you want to and have a nice dinner that's included with your cruise fare and you don't have to dress up if you don't want to. It's, it's a pretty awesome experience. There's a bunch of bars and lounges too and there's so many that we're going to be exploring. We're going to be checking out the waterfront, which is the, you know, it's like a quarter mile of oceanfront promenade that they have. We're going to do sugar cane mojito bar. Of course, there's the district brew house on board, which is really cool. There's the tobacco road liquor bar. So if you're into like cocktails and whiskey and stuff like that, you got to go there and have a blackberry bourbon smash, which I will definitely be doing. They have a wine bar. They have all kinds of good stuff. So that's kind of the restaurant scene. Mr. Curtis, do you want to talk about the activities now? Of course. Let's go. Let's do it. Let's do it. So I'm really excited for the aquapark on this one. I'm a water slide girl. I'm totally into it. Even though I'm 50 years old, I still love me a good water slide, except I'm not super into those, uh, you knew I was going to say this. Do you do not like drop slides? The ones that make you feel like your tummy is like rushing up. So you and junior, I will hold the camera. You guys are on drop slide duty, but I'm totally into the other ones, the other slides. There's four different water slides, but you guys, you get to do the free fall slides. And I will do the family, the family friendly slides, like sitting on a raft or whatever should be fun. Now they also have a ropes course on this particular ship, which I think is so fun. I've been on ropes courses before on a cruise ship. And of course, you have to, the weather has to be good in order to do this. But there's something really different about this ropes course, you guys. And that is not only is it like way up there, like 19 decks up, but they have a plank. And you can actually like walk the plank. There is a plank that extends out over the ship. So while you're all harnessed up and going out and doing the whole, um, the plank situation, you can take some pretty killer photos. You can't take your camera, but you can like have somebody down on the lower decks doing the walk the plank coverage. And of course, there's a thermal suite on this particular line. And many of the Norwegian ships have really phenomenal thermal suites, but escape has really one of the biggest impests. And they've got like sonnas, they have steam rooms, but they also have a salt room and a snow room and hydrotherapy pool and your typical kind of loungers and all that good stuff. And they have these beautiful views off the bow. So we're really, really excited to check all of that out. So Mr. Cruise and CV, those are kind of the highlights here. This is, this is going to be a busy five days for us. We're going to be trying to capture so much for you all. I mean, doing a ship tour on a five day cruise is going to be very interesting for us. But we are, we're here for it and we're excited to bring everything to you. If you have any specific questions to you about Norwegian escape, I'll try to get a post up so that we can get a Q&A sort of going. Try not to DM me your questions because it's really hard for me to track those, but I'll get a post up on Facebook or Instagram where you can type the questions and where I can easily refer back to them. Good stuff. Awesome. Very awesome. So we've got to go finish packing friends, but we wanted to let you all know what was up and what our big surprise announcement was, buzz over to Facebook and Instagram, follow the rest, and we'll have, of course, a really super comprehensive review when we get home from this particular cruise telling you all about it and sure it'll be at least a one-parter, but maybe even a two-parter. Oh, and we'll let you know how we enjoy Bermuda. We're doing a, we're doing the caves in the zoo over in Bermuda. So thank you all so much for all your great suggestions on things to do in Bermuda. Should be a fun one. Alright friends, until next time, we'll see you on the high seas, have a good one. Thanks for listening to CruiseTipsTV Unplugged. If you like our show and want to know more, check us out at cruisetipsTV.com. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram by searching CruiseTipsTV. We'd love if you'd leave us a review wherever you're listening to this podcast, subscribe to the show, and tune in next week. Until next time, we'll see you on the high seas.