Travelling with a child … On a cruise ship around the Mediterranean

In 2019 we decided to celebrate my Mother in Law’s 60th birthday on a cruise ship. Now, I am not going to lie, I was initially quite apprehensive about this. A cruise ship with a 3-year-old, nowhere to escape to when needed and a tiny cabin (was the impression I had in my mind before boarding the ship).

How wrong could I have been! We sailed on Royal Caribbean, on the Oasis of the Sea’s, a ship built in 2009 with a guest capacity of 5,606 people, it really is a wonder of the seas and felt like a floating city.

With 25 dining options, multiple bars and lounges you had plenty of choices. There was a great selection of entertainment for the children on offer, the smaller children could enjoy the various swimming pools, kid’s clubs, puppet theatre and even a carousel. Whilst the older children had a football pitch and basketball court, waterslides, cinema and even a junior disco. There was a zip line for the more adventurous folk (like my mother in law) rock climbing walls and a Flo Rider wave machine.

One of the highlights for me was the Aqua Theatre, where they put on spectacular dive shows every afternoon/evening. The Royal Theatre also put on stage productions every day; the earlier ones are suitable for young families as well.

We loved strolling along the Royal Promenade, which felt like we were walking through a street in a city, with tree-lined walkways and even Tiffany the jewellery store. Which my Husband tried desperately to avoid. However, he didn’t try as had hard to avoid the casino…

I was really surprised just how much there was to do on the ship, in fact in some ports we didn’t even get off the ship. This was in part due to bad planning, as we hadn’t organized excursions in advance. So when we left the ship we either had to wait quite a long time to do so anything or just wandered round the cities, taking in the sights. However, we were also very happy just to be on the ship, as there was so much to keep everyone entertained.

I realized as I came to the end of this post that I haven’t spoken about the cities we visited on the cruise. We embarked on the ship in Barcelona and travelled to Mallorca, Provence, Florence, Rome, Naples and back to Barcelona. We had a near miss when a few trains were cancelled in Rome and we thought we might not make it back to the ship on time. Luckily, we did manage, with half an hour to spare.

Cruising and Royal Caribbean... I will most definitely be back!