What a way to have a wedding.
The story of Aaron and Louis is fascinating on its own, but this only touches the bit where they marry and set sail on the world’s largest cruise ship, Symphony of the Seas.
The ceremony, vows, and proceeding were touching, tearful, comical and fun. For the men of the hour it was obviously much more.
Both of them are airline pilots. They even flew together as Captain and First officer once until they both wound up as Captains. Then Louis got hired by JetBlue, followed shortly by Aaron–a surprise presented at the ceremony. Aaron just got offered a job the day before. Even that story is comical since they sometimes answer the phone for each other. I’ll leave it at that.
Wedding Venue
Dazzles is a two-story lounge that sits astride two towering sides of the ship. An enormous front window overlooks “the Boardwalk” that features a carousel among other attractions. Gigantic slides sprout from a deck that crosses those two towering sides with the ship’s name.
There was some amount of complexity getting to where we needed to be since you had to find the appropriate cruise terminal and find your way to the meeting place, but it turned out to be a non-event. Primarily because there were so many people along the way to grease your motion; people who knew right where to send you upon hearing “wedding party”. And then Audrey. She managed the maze of procedures and places to get everyone to the right place.
It’s two levels with an immense front wind looking out into “Central Park.”
The Ship
This is one big boat. Titanic was the largest ship of its time, but Symphony of the Seas carries 3 TIMES more people and displaces 3 times the amount of water. Thankfully, its size and activities makes if not feel overly crowded.
My only comments are:
Have more soft-serve ice cream stations, keep them open longer, and keep the ice cream colder. Maybe that’s tough to do but hey, they’ve figured out how to make an artificial surfing wave I’m thinking they can pull this off.
Have more ping-pong tables. There are 3 that are protected from the wind and 2 that are only partially protected. Ping pong doesn’t work well in the wind so just protect those tables more.
Run the rides for longer. Lines for the WaveRider This could be partially solved squirting water it would nice to have more ice cream stations although they need more soft ice cream stations. One doesn’t cut it.
It’s powered by 3 immense diesel engines that power generators. Electric motors in pods propel the ship.
Sea Sickness & Stabilization
Ships pitch, roll, and heave (up/down) but roll is what gets most people sick on cruise ships. Pitch (bow tilting up/down) and heave is a bigger deal on smaller boats. What’s amazing about this thing is that it is nearly rock steady in roll. Probably a combination of anti-roll stabilizers and a HUGE beam (width). Most of the cruise it was difficult to detect motion. Our cabin was on the 8th deck so it would be less noticeable than the 15th, but still that’s dang impressive.
Even if you are subject to seasickness, it won’t be as a much a factor here unless seas get big or the ship has problems.
Problems
Cruising along someone in our group noticed land. “That’s not supposed to be there.” No long afterwards the captain came on and said we had a sick passenger that needed to be “disembarked” in Nassau, Bahamas.
When we left Miami the speed was steady just under 20 mph or so. That’s all they needed to reach our first port on time and it costs a LOT more fuel to go faster. After dropping this woman off Captain put the hammer down to make our next port of call on time. And we did.
