u/profjonathan

Greetings from Anthem of the Seas, at sea on Day 2 of our sail from Seattle to Alaska. This is our second cruise on RCCL (third overall), after doing our first-ever cruise two years ago on Symphony of the Seas. We are on a sailing with the Fresh Kosher option (see my forum post on the Royal Caribbean Blog for more info), meaning that the organizer has reserved the Solarium Bistro for the entire cruise as our sole restaurant choice. Walking up to the ship yesterday before boarding, it looked about as big to me as had Symphony, and the same was true in the photos I saw while booking.

Obviously, those of you with more experience know how wrong I was.

The first clue was shortly after boarding, when we went to our buffet lunch in the Solarium Bistro. It was of course located in the same part of the ship as its Symphony counterpart, but I was startled by how much smaller it was. Where Symphony had had three full buffet stations in the center plus the ones on the wall, Anthem has a single smaller station in mid-floor and a shorter set of stations along the wall. Obviously, the seating was also more compact, but it was the buffet that told the tale. The other real obvious difference was in the public space on decks 4 and 5; rather than the open expanse of Central Park on Symphony, Anthem's two floors of Royal Esplanade reminds us very much of the layout and scope of the similar area on Sun Princess, our other previous cruise. (A quick Internet search confirms that Anthem and Sun Princess are of similar scale, so that makes sense.) Beyond that, and at least so far, there are obviously fewer shows on Anthem, and only one requires reservations. The ship is, of course, still quite spacious, and while we do not visit the specialty restaurants and other dining areas (beyond Sorrento's, at which our program organizer has arranged for a kosher pizza option with a separate ordering area and its own dedicated oven, and the soft-serve ice cream machine on the pool deck), but I'd imagine they too are smaller than their Oasis-class counterparts.

That said, I think we may well end up preferring the Quantum-class ships to Oasis or larger, since it is just my wife and myself traveling, and we prefer the shorter hikes from end to end and the somewhat quieter vibe. We've got Odyssey coming up in January, so that will either verify or disprove this initial observation.

Smooth sailing!

In my old house, I have no neutral wires in the lightswitches, so I've opted for no-neutral switches. Cync offers one of the few choices that does not also require a hub, so I've tried them (model CSWONBLPWF1), but they've been quirky at best. Most recently, one of my switches (which has only been installed for a month or two) stopped responding to the Cync app as well as the Alexa skill. I've had others that do that, and have used the "create a new Home" trick to fix them, but this one switch won't re-pair with the Cync app to even be configured. I've reset it (long press until it cycles through red and then flashing blue LED) multiple times, and tried over and over on two different phones (one iPhone and one Android), all without success. I'm going to try to completely cut power to the switch and reboot it that way, but if it doesn't work, are there any other troubleshooting tips people have? Or even a way to determine if perhaps the Bluetooth module in the switch (which enables pairing) has failed? Thanks.

We're going on Royal in August, and will be staying at a hotel before and after our cruise. We want to bring a travel kettle for the hotel (I've seen one too many videos about hotel room coffeemakers!), but we know we won't be allowed to use it onboard (nor do we want to). I have no desire in trying to sneak it past Royal security; is there an established process for intentionally checking and retrieving items one may not use onboard? Much obliged.