We love cruising with Oceania! The food is amazing and the crews are so helpful and so friendly – always up for a joke – and they call you by name which is just so nice.

We have cruised on three of their beautiful ships, the Regatta and the Sirena (two of the smaller ones taking 684 passengers) and the Marina which can take 1250 passengers and has 750 crew to take care of you.

Our first Oceania experience was cruising the Baltic on the Marina in 2016. Previous to this, we had done several river cruises and cruised the Mediterranean on the Queen Elizabeth in 2012. We wanted to cruise the Baltic and we were looking for a cruise that visited the ports of Riga in Latvia and Klapedia in Lithuania because David’s family migrated to Australia from that area around 1888. How lucky were we that the ship we found on that route was the Marina? We had a wonderful time. The crew were so much fun and they made us feel that they were enjoying the cruise as much as we were.

In February 2017 we cruised on the Sirena from Papeete in Tahiti to Sydney in Australia. Unfortunately we encountered some unpleasant weather but the crew were very helpful and we thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the cruise.

Last year, our cruise to Alaska on Regatta ended very prematurely because I became ill and was taken off the ship at Ketchikan & flown by air ambulance to Bellingham in Washington State. The lovely doctor and nurse on the ship looked after me so well as did all of the medical staff and ambulance staff that took care of me. Even the passengers on the ship were amazing. I was bleeding internally and may have needed a blood transfusion so the doctor put out a call for passengers prepared to give the right type of blood to come to the surgery and, even though it was 9:30 on a Friday night, many people came and donated their blood. I found this very humbling. If you read this blog and you were one of those people, I thank you very sincerely.

You’ve probably heard or seen Oceania’s claim to “The Finest Cuisine at Sea” and you may be wondering if it’s true. Well, as I mentioned earlier most of our ocean cruises have been with Oceania so we can’t really confirm the truth of that claim. But what we can tell you is that we love the food and the total dining experience. We love that there is no extra charge for eating in the speciality restaurants. We love that we can go on line a few weeks before a cruise and book our nights in those speciality restaurants. We love that you can have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Grand Dining Room any time you please during the hours it is open. We love that you can sit anywhere and choose to share your table with friends or with strangers or sit by yourselves and have a romantic dinner for two. We love that they cater to people with particular dietary needs without fuss.

Unless we have an early excursion, we love to have a long leisurely breakfast in the Grand Dining Room where David loves to order the grilled lamb chops. We love the grilled lobster served in the Polo Grill. What I really love is anything on the menu in Red Ginger, the Asian Restaurant. The decor is red and black and the food is simply amazing. That’s my favourite! We tend to have lunch in the Waves Grill so that we can have a smaller snack rather than a big meal but there are so many delicious choices in the buffet that we do still have a larger lunch that we planned. This is why we have never made it to afternoon tea which is highly recommended by others. On Oceania, Barista’s serves great Illy flat whites and all tea, coffee and soft drinks are included.

On 19th April we will be back on the Marina for a 14 day cruise from Southhampton to Barcelona. We’ve booked our restaurants and sorted out our port days and are counting the days – but before that we have seven lovely days in Paris. How lucky are we?