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I took a recent cruise and I guess that I'll use this post to write some about the cruise itself since Great Stirrup Cay is owned by Norwegian. My party sailed on the Epic. This was my 2nd time sailing with Norwegian. I've also sailed with Carnival and Royal Caribbean.
The Food
Taking a cruise you should expect great food overall. In my opinion the food on Royal Caribbean is a small step behind what I've had on Carnival and Norwegian. On the ship all food is not created equal. Most cruise lines have made recent efforts to get their passegers to pay for their more upscale dining options. I would recommend skipping those meals in favor of the main dining room.
On board Epic their main dining room was called Taste and there was another dining room called Manhattan where you could have the same meals while listening to live Jazz music. My party was never able to get into the Manhattan dining room. There was a buffet up on the 15th floor. The buffet's on cruise ships generally have good food, but not as good as the main dining room. I would recommend not compromising on the main dining room for lunch or dinner. The big exceptions for times that you may want to enjoy the buffet would be breakfast and after dinner this particular ship had crepes available in the buffet.
The only other cruise I've taken in the past decade was with Royal Caribbean. Royal Caribbean was a small step behind the other cruise lines in the quality of their food, but their scheduling was much better managed. With Royal Caribbean they had early seating and late seating as the 2 main options. You would sit at the same table and have the same servers every night. In their main theater shows would take place twice every night; once after the early dinner which is while the late dinner was taking place and once following that for those who had the late dinner. I think that I was able to see every show on that Royal Caribbean ship. On the Norwegian Epic they didn't have 2 seatings for dinner. Everyone just lined up when they wanted to eat and they would seat you like at a restaurant. Dinner frequently took more than 2 hrs. If you wanted to see a show then you generally had to arrive very early if you wanted a seat. I was able to find a seat for just 1 show and I was able to watch a Beatles cover band where there was standing room only.
Great Stirrup Cay
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Norwegian Cruise Lines bought Great Stirrup Cay in the '70s and developed it as a cruise port. The excursions availabe here are all available through the cruise ship and you there's not really outside excursions available. When you eat on the island there are free dining options and options that you can purchase similar to what's available on the ship. I was excited to try Abaco Taco, but I didn't think the food was very good there. They had a food truck offering ceviche and I was similarly disappointed there. If you're able to go snorkeling on the island there are a number of submersed statues that you can check out.
Swimming with the pigs of Treasure Island
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I had seen videos on YouTube of people swimming with the pigs, it looked awesome. I'm guessing this spot was not the original swimming with the pigs destination, it didn't look like what I had seen on the YouTube video. There's another one available near Nassau. This was basically a glorified petting zoo for $150.
First we all were arranged on a deck where souvenirs and drinks were available for purchase. We went through a safety briefing. Everyone was told to leave their phones and cameras on this deck and then sent to spend time with the pigs. You could sit on a bench and hold a pig, or stand and hold a pig. They also gave us skewers to put chunks of apple on that we could feed the pigs. These pigs didn't appear to have any natural inclination to swim in the ocean, but it was easy enough to coax some of the bigger pigs into the water with apples.
The larger pigs probably weighed over 100 lbs. While I was there I saw one of the staff members carrying a woman away. The story that I heard later was that 2 pigs went for the same chunk of apple, this woman got knocked over and broke her wrist. She said that she knew it was broken because she had broken the same wrist recently.
After this glorified petting zoo/photo op we were allowed to take some of the smaller pigs onto the deck described earlier and we did get a chance to take some pictures with our own phones.
I hadn't been able to book this excursion ahead of the trip and worried that it had sold out. If you want to do this excursion and it's not available when you first check then I would recommend checking at the shore excursion desk while on board the ship.
If you want to see some of the official pics taken by the staff at Treasure Island, they have a website here. https://swimmingpigs.photostockplus.com/ I didn't bother to buy any of them, they charge like $50 for 3 pics and we were able to take some of our own pics on the deck.
I'm still new to the Pinmapple community, this is my second Pinmapple post. I would love to make so much money blogging about travel that I could quit my day job and just do this, but I'm not expecting much. I do plan to share some more posts about the ports from my cruise and I'm not sure when I'll next have an opportunity to travel.
I'm sorry to not be using my own photos from this trip. My phone drowned in the Dominican Republic. I plan to make a few more posts about this trip using photos from online and will plan to use my own photos for subsequent trips.
What sort of information do you like to see included in Pinmapple posts? I’m hoping to keep them fairly short and sweet. What do you think of my format for this post? Any constructive criticism is appreciated, but use your words. Telling me to make my posts better is not helpful without examples and/or descriptive words.
I hope this post has been helpful and informative. Thanks for reading and thanks for all the upvotes, reblogs, comments and follows.
Lastly, I'm hoping that this community will be interactive. I would love to hear your comments and considerations if you happen upon a post about someplace you've lived or visited. I'll try to do the same for you when I stumble onto a post about somewhere I love to visit.