Cruise Ship Review: Norwegian Epic
This year for Christmas my boyfriend bought me a cruise on
Norwegian Epic in January. January is an
off-season time for cruise ships, and Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) enticed us
to choose one of their itineraries by including a beverage package (notoriously
a bad deal if bought onboard) with a stay in a balcony or suite stateroom. So we booked a balcony on an itinerary, which
included Cozumel, Mexico, Grand Cayman, and Ocho Rios, Jamaica. This was the second cruise we took with
Norwegian, and it quickly elevated Norwegian to our second favorite cruise
line. Royal Caribbean is our favorite
mostly due to its awesome loyalty program (see my post about cruse line loyally programs here).
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| The Norwegian Epic in port in Cozumel |
What sets NCL apart from other cruise lines is its freestyle cruising. On each ship, NCL provides a choice of dinning rooms, along with a buffet, and small restaurants. No assigned dinning times exist, and guests are free to choose where they eat and when they eat. Norwegian Epic has two main dinning rooms on board, the Manhattan Room and Taste Contemporary. However despite the differing décor and locations on the ship, both dinning rooms offered the same menu, making their differences merely cosmetic. When we actually ate in a main dinning rooms, our choice was made based on whatever dinning room had the shorter line. Usually one dinning room had 30 minute wait while the other had none, with the dinning room lacking a wait time seeming to alternate throughout the cruise. Near the beginning of the cruise, the Manhattan Room was more likely to have a wait, while near the end the dinning room with a wait was Taste Contemporary. The Manhattan Room entrance was easier to find, and I have a hypothesis that most guests did not find the entrance to Taste Contemporary until later in the cruise, causing the Manhattan Room to have a wait at the beginning of the cruise and Taste Contemporary to acquire the wait later in the week.
By far our favorite venues to eat on the ship were the
buffet and O’Sheenan’s Pub. Often times
we went to the buffet for dessert after eating dinner elsewhere, because custom-made
crepes (a favorite food of mine) were available every night. Also always available at the buffet was a
monstrously large ice cream sunday bar.
Guests could choose from soft serve or hard ice cream, which is usually
an extra cost on other cruise lines, and a variety of syrups, sauces,
sprinkles, whipped cream, and nuts. Most
of the other food in the buffet, is typical cruise buffet food, hamburgers, hot
dogs, Indian curries, salad bar, pizza by the slice, and the like. Outside the buffet, we discovered a nacho bar
(another of my favorite foods) also available every day. I only had nachos once though, due to the
plethora of my favorite foods. I had to
pace myself if I wanted to try them all.
Eating at O’Sheenan’s was a daily/nightly occurrence for us
on this cruise. The Irish pub had the
perfect combination of buffalo chicken wings for my boyfriend and veggie
burgers (another of my favorite foods) for me.
The veggie burgers are not on the menu, but I asked every time we went,
and they were always available. Aside
from the food, O’Sheenan’s offered entertainment. We watched guests bowl on the two bowling
lanes adjacent to restaurant and were able to view the interactive Deal or No
Deal Game show on the deck below, as the restaurants overlooks the stage where
the game show is played.
Aside from the food, another feature we supremely liked
about Epic were the shows. Unlike other
cruise lines NCL out sources its largest shows, meaning they find companies
that are really good at what they do, and contract them to put on entire shows
on the ship instead of putting together some lame knock off. On our cruise we were treated to Blue Man Group, the Las Vegas based Legends in Concert, Howl at the Moon
dueling piano bar, and the comedy of Second City, based out of Chicago. I thought Blue
Man Group was going to be a quirky shows that catered mostly to
children. I completely underestimated
it. I spent most of the show with my jaw
hanging open, and seriously questioned my sobriety during the finale, wondering
if something was slipped in my diet coke, it was just that good. My boyfriend enjoyed Blue Man Group so much, he saw it again on the last night of our
cruise. This was the same exact show he
had seen earlier in the week. I did not
attend the second show, because it conflicted with a movie I had been wanting
to see Bears by Disney Nature. Legends
in Concert features a rotating cast of impersonators which fly out from Las
Vegas. The line up changes every couple
of months. On our cruise, we saw Jimmy
Buffet, Adele, and Tina Turner. I have
never been a fan of impersonators, but I now believe that’s because all the
impersonators I have previously seen sucked.
The Legends in Concert show at
times felt more like a concert, the audience was so into it, singing along with
almost every word.
By far my favorite show of the cruise were the shows by
second city in the smaller bar-like venue outside the main auditorium. I say shows, because we went to three of
their shows. As second city specializes
in improve comedy no two shows were alike, and one of the shows featured stand
up by one of the comedians. On the
stateroom TV (how we booked some of our shows), all of the comedy shows had the same
description. We had to visit the box
office and talk to a real person to find out which shows were not just improv. In the same room Second City performed in, we
saw Howl at the Moon. We waited until
the last performance of Howl at the Moon to attend, because every other time we
tried to go it was packed out the door. We
decided to grin and bear it for the last show though, and we not
disappointed. Howl at the Moon is
extremely audience interactive, with the three singers/piano players
alternating on the dueling pianos with requests from the audience. Usually only songs which came with a tip or
drink were played, only because the musicians were constantly receiving tips
and drinks. I even saw a person tip $10
for them to stop playing a song, which was treated with a roar of
laughter.
For children of all ages Epic features a water park. I call it a water park, as on the pool deck
is a collection of three multistory slides.
One of the slides actually has a section which extends beyond the side
of the ship. Use that slide with caution
as it needs refurbishment to smooth out the surface. My boyfriend and I both had red backs after
riding it down. The epic plunge however
was the favorite. This slide, which must
be ridden in a inner tube, brings riders through a tube which shoots them out into what
I can only describe as a giant and very colorful toilet bowl. The tube slides around the bowl for a few
laps before inevitable dropping through the hole in the middle and onto the
ending ramp. I was surprised by how
short the lines were for the slides, and we spent about an hour on them before
we got bored the two times we ventured to the water park.
On the other side of the smoke stack, the back of the water
park, is extreme rock climbing. I love
rock climbing on ships, and often it is my favorite activity. My rock climbing experience on Epic left much
to be desired though. I found all of the
routes either exceedingly easy or insanely difficult. I prefer a challenge, but I also want to have
a chance at reaching the top of the wall.
Those were the highlights of Epic, I now want to cast some
warnings. First off the bathrooms in the
staterooms offer almost no privacy. The
bathroom areas are only separated from the main area of the stateroom by
frosted glass. While you can pull a
curtain across the room to shield the toilet from view, the curtain offers absolutely
no soundproofing. I was happy we had a
balcony as one of use had a place to go sit to afford the other some
privacy. The staterooms also have curved
walls, which I believe is supposed to make them look bigger as they are quiet
narrow. I am just under 6 ft. and had to
sleep in the fetal position to prevent my feet from hanging over the edge of
the bed which was not full length. A full-length
bed would have crossed the entire narrow stateroom, leaving no room to walk
around it.
Another annoyance not limited to the stateroom was the
location of the casino. On most ships,
the casino is tucked away somewhere in the bowels of the ship. On Epic the casino was distributed throughout
one of the main floors and walk-ways. The
presence of slot machines everywhere I looked did not so much bother me as the
cigarette smoking that accompanied it.
The reason casinos are usually tucked away is to contain the second hand
smoke. However, on Epic this habit is
way more in your face.
I bought an internet package on Epic just to check my
emails. On Epic internet is presented in
packages of how many minutes a guest would like in total. I used the same package over 3 days on the
cruise, logging on and off with my laptop.
The internet on Epic is exceedingly slow, which almost makes the pay by
the minute set up laughable. I had to
use the basic html function on my email accounts. I would not recommend buying internet of Epic
to anyone who does not know how to enable the basic html function on their
email, as the regular email display may never load. Even for my computer savvy self, the internet
did not prove intuitive to use. I
assumed that if I turned on my computer, and selected the epic wifi in the drop
down menu, when I opened my internet browser, a login window would
automatically open up with internet package options. That was not the case. My second idea was to go to the NCL webpage,
which guests can access for free, thinking an option would exist on the webpage
to purchase an internet package. That
did not work either. I had to call guest
services for assistance. It turns out I
had to access a webpage called logon.com to purchase an internet package,
something I never found instructions for anywhere on the ship.
NCL is one of the more technology savvy cruise liens. NCL offers and app for iphones, and I assume
others. This Norwegian iconcierge is
free to use on the ship. The app can be
used to access dinner menus for the entire week and to book shows, both of
which can also be done on the stateroom TV.
I would call the app more a novelty than something of actual use.
The other main negatives of Epic have to do with
Embarkation/Disembarkation. We took Epic
out of Miami, which is about 15 minutes south of the Port of Ft. Lauderdale,
where parking is $5 cheaper a day. Also
disembarkation was a mess. Guests were
allowed to choose when they want to depart, which resulted in what seemed like
everyone trying to leave at once. We
dealt with super long lines both on the ship waiting to get off and off the
ship trying to get through customs. The
only worse experience I have had on a disembarkation day was when I could not
find a bathroom on a ship, because all of the bathrooms were flooded.
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