I’m currently onboard an all-inclusive weekend cruise on one of the oldest and smallest cruise ships around. The ship I’m sailing on started her life with Celebrity Cruises and now is a completely adult-only ship where everything, including alcohol, is included.
Being adult-only was one of the things that first attracted me to this cruise. I wanted to cruise with my friend and because of her work, we had to stick to the school holidays. When I saw this short 4-night cruise sailing from Spain advertised from £600 ($740) I thought this would be the perfect time to give it a go. In reality, as with most cruises, I did end up paying more than that.
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I knew that this cruise might turn into a bit of a booze cruise given the unlimited alcohol, I wasn’t sure if 4 days would be long enough, and as this would be my friend's first cruise as an adult, I hoped that my choice wouldn’t let her down. Some of the reviews made it sound awful as they always do.
We flew to Palma in Majorca to board the ship and all of our transfers and flights were included with the cruise fare. As soon as we got off the plane we were met by the Marella representative and put on our coach, it was very easy and our suitcases were taken from the bus to the ship for us. We boarded the ship at 8pm which wasn’t ideal as it did feel like we were missing that first day but because the flights came with the cruise there wasn’t much that we could do about that. I did meet people on the ship who had been onboard since 2pm which I’m very envious about but we were just very excited to get onboard by this point.
The ship that we were boarding was Marella Explorer 2, she started her life as the Celebrity Century way back in 1995 and she’s less than half the size of the current biggest cruise ship in the world. There aren’t many cruise ships this old still sailing so I was interested to see if she would feel her age. I’d booked a quirky cabin too which you don’t find on modern cruise ships.
When we walked into the ship we decided to head straight up the stairs to find our cabin. The main thing on our minds at this point was food because we’d been travelling since lunchtime but we wanted to drop off our bags first. It certainly was strange having our first look at the ship in the dark but each bar that we passed was decorated in a completely different theme to the last, which I really liked. I don’t have a great sense of direction and I need things to have very obvious themes so I know what they are, for example, if you said you’d meet me in the golf bar on this ship, there would be no confusion.
Heading up to the buffet, I was impressed with the layout and the design. The buffet actually goes all the way around the back of the ship and it was here that we got our first glimpse of the included drinks.
