Our journey on the MSC Seaside continued with three more days at sea and two more days at port. For the sea days, the big activity for me was the continuation and finally completion of our pickleball tournament. It took a long time because it wasn’t easy to get the right four players at the court at the same time given everybody’s differing schedules. Dylan and I ended up winning the tournament, but the whole thing was a lot of fun. It was a fantastic group of people to spend the 19-day cruise with.

Sandy was able to continue her planning work for some of our upcoming 2026 travels and enjoy reading time. We still did our workouts in the gym and kept up with our normal routines for our meals. We did more of the theater shows and Friday night’s show was a Michael Jackson tribute show. It was one of the best shows we have ever seen on a cruise ship. It’s called Starwalker and the guy who plays Michael is unbelievable. His dancing and showmanship is exactly like Michael himself. Oustanding!

We were in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten on Wednesday. We have been there before and so we didn’t do any sightseeing. We took the opportunity to get off the ship and do our workout along the boardwalk, which was a four-mile combination of running and walking. The humidity was high, and we came back from the workout completely soaked. Thursday was our stop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We had to go through US passport control because the ship was coming into a US territory from Europe. That was a very quick process for US citizens. This was our first time in San Juan since 2014, and it has done a great job recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The power lines are less chaotic than we remember and there is a lot of fresh paint on the buildings and new squares. We did our own walking tour of Old San Juan with the stops including El Morro Fort, which the National Park Service has created an informative experience on the history of the fort. We walked through La Perla neighborhood. It’s a colorful neighborhood on the north shore that has had some crime problems, but it was fine during the day, and you just need to be respectful of their desire to not have photos taken. Several chicken families were seen around the neighborhood and Sandy couldn’t resist taking a picture of some of the cute baby chicks. We also went to the church which houses the tomb of Juan Ponce de Leon. After our walk of eight miles, we stopped in a smoothie shop and enjoyed mango, banana, and papaya smoothies. The shop owner was really friendly – we happen to be coming back to San Juan next week – we may have to stop in again. We couldn’t believe how quiet the traffic was as we walked around the town. No horns blowing even when there were traffic delays. It was a great experience all around.

That wraps up our time on the MSC Seaside. Although it took a few days to get used to the ship and the differences with MSC compared to other cruise lines, we are happy with the whole experience. Highlights are the food, which was almost always excellent and the entertainment. The staff was overall pretty good – not as outgoing as on other ships we have sailed, but perfectly fine. For this kind of itinerary, it was understandable to not have many kids on the ship – not sure if that is common for MSC cruises or it was just because it was a long crossing and most kids would be in school right now. We would absolutely sail again on MSC.

This morning, we left our stateroom at 7:30 and went to the buffet to eat and wait for our time to disembark. Our lodging in Sarasota doesn’t start until next Sunday so we decided to book a second cruise to get us through the extra week. We are still wanting to balance our budget from the expensive time we had in Iceland and Greenland and the deals we got for these two cruises just couldn’t be beat. We left MSC Seaside at 9:40am and it was the easiest disembarkation ever – everything is done through facial recognition and so we walked right off. Our new home – the Royal Caribbean Independence of the Seas was parked right behind us at the Miami pier and that could not have been more convenient. We left the MSC area and walked upstairs to get in line to board the Independence of the Seas. The boarding process was just ok. I wanted to coach the designers of the process that when you have 25 lines that people just pick where to go on their own, it can create a lot of frustration. We had to do that twice and both times, we ended up in lines where people were having issues and so our lines came to a standstill. Not the end of the world, but the process where there is a single line and somebody directs the next person to the next available agent always seems to work more smoothly. We were onboard by Noon, and we grabbed fish n chips and shrimp while we waited for our stateroom to be ready at 1pm. We toured our new city (ship) and then we left the pier a little after 5pm. It was a beautiful departure. Between watching the other ships leave the port and doing our own turnaround in the channel with the Miami skyline shining as the sun went down, it was a memorable departure. Dinner was in the dining room and Neeraj took great care of us. We enjoyed talking with Cindy from Cincinnati and Neville & Marie from the Bahamas. Neeraj asked all of us to come back to his table every night so we made reservations for the rest of the week.