Have you ever done something, thinking “I guess this is better than nothing,” but with time and daylight and further reflection revised your assessment to, “nothing would have been infinitely better.” Such has been my internal dialogue when it comes to the following video tour of my cabin on Holland America’s ms Zuiderdam.
This is not the polished, professional quality cruise vlog that will finally revive my flailing youtube channel. No, this is a grainy Prof. Cruise wearing a free t-shirt that shrunk 3 sizes the first time she washed it, recording on the cheapest phone available with her $35 a month Republic Wireless plan, touring a cabin where underwear hanging on the shower clothesline is the least offensive thing you’ll see.
I use the 3rd person as I cling to the delusion that I’m not the one who produced and published the cruise vlog equivalent of that time my dog ate and then barfed up an entire bag of Trader Joe’s Thai Lime and Chili Cashews: I mean there were tons of whole, undigested nuts in there, but no amount of rinsing would make them palatable.
So with that ringing endorsement, here’s a video tour of cabin 8130 on ms Zuiderdam, an inside cabin located on deck 8 aft. Survive (I’d say enjoy, but, well…)!
Don’t send me your therapy bill if you actually watched that thing – I tried to warn you! Moving on with sincere apologies…
Some of you may be booked or considering one of the horizontal facing inside cabins on ms Zuiderdam or one of the other Vista-class ships on Holland America (ms Oosterdam, ms Westerdam, and ms Noordam). These cabins include numbers:
4011, 4012, 4017, 4018, 4023, 4024, 4029, 4030, 4147, 4148, 4153, 4154, 4157, 4158, 4165, 4168, 4171, 5005, 5008, 5010, 5011, 5017, 5018, 5022, 5023, 5029, 5030, 5034, 5155, 5156, 5161, 5164, 5165, 5166, 6001, 6002, 6007, 6010, 6014, 6015, 6021, 6022, 6027, 6028, 6034, 8118, 8125
Mr. Cruise was booked in one of these (8118), so I captured a quick video so you could see how it’s different (all the details are the same, it’s just a slightly different layout). I should have had you watch this one first to lure you into a sense of normality.
Here’s how the bed in cabin 8130 looked before a ragtag troupe of monkeys celebrated getting fired from the circus in there:
And here’s how the desk area looked:
And the restroom:
The following items and documents were present when we arrived in our stateroom for the first time:
Which I took home loaded up with all the extra Kleenex and toilet paper (true story).
The “cocktail” turned out to be sparkling wine. I scored all of the coupons in both our rooms since mom and my son don’t drink and Mr. Cruise bought a drink package. I saved them all up for New Year’s Eve in the dining room and performed auld lang syne in burps (a very effective strategy to encourage social distancing).
Good luck, little app, the average age on the Zuiderdam was 100 and that’s only because of my 8 year-old. When he turned 9 onboard, the average increased to 101.
Which I started to work my way through until the Captain announced our ship had positive Covid cases among both crew and passengers and I witnessed hazmat-suited crew members outside the doors of three of my neighbors on deck 8. Then I switched to KN95’s that I decorated to read: Do not enter unless you’re 40,000 daily calories worth of cruise food. Mom wished I’d also allowed a toothbrush in.
At least if you get quarantined to your stateroom, you’ll have a nice selection of overpriced beverages (click HERE to see what quarantined passengers ate on our ship).
The luggage mat will serve as a final resting place for the bed bugs who hitched a ride from your pre-cruise budget motel and decided to kill themselves upon discovering they were on a cruise ship during a Covid wave: “What have I done? I’d rather live out eternity in the stomach of a roach!”
The tiny orange card is a time-change reminder. Sadly, it didn’t prevent me from showing up to my excursion an hour early demanding a refund: “It’s 6am, Karen.”
Clearly HAL understands their demographic as paper schedules were still provided on the bed each evening in addition to being available on the Navigator App. Otherwise every Guest Services crew member would fake Covid to avoid yelling this 5,000 times a day: “FIRST YOU HAVE TO TURN ON YOUR PHONE, SIR!”
If you’re sharing a room with your husband for the first time since your honeymoon (43 years ago) because the sounds he makes at night are akin to wild boars during mating season, you’ll want to use this card to request the bed be separated. Also ask for some extra pillows to throw at him or to low-key suffocate him with if it comes to that: “Sorry Fred, but the neighbors rang to ask if an exorcism was being performed in here.”
While I’d been spoiled with cheap upgrades to spacious balcony cabins on my prior two cruises and enjoyed the more contemporary decor of the newer NCL and Royal Caribbean ships, there were quite a few things I loved about this scrappy little (and I do mean little) inside cabin on ms Zuiderdam.
I used to think cruise lines made the beds so comfortable so you’d stay in them all day ordering expensive room service and pay-per-view movies. But Holland America blew my theory with their free room service and nice selection of complimentary on-demand flicks. It’s possible I never would have left my stateroom on the Zuiderdam if I didn’t have a kid in a cabin down the hall who expected me to spend Christmas, his birthday, and New Year’s with him (kids are so demanding).
But let me tell you, once mom and I had the bed separated and she stopped practicing for her black belt in karate on me in her sleep, the mattress, comforter, and pillows made for a blissful night’s rest. I woke energized and ready for a marathon (of eating).
You’ll note that I never provide a photo of the two chocolates we received from our room steward each evening. That’s because I don’t want mom to know I grabbed them up and locked them in my nightstand before she saw them and ate all 20 on my flight home to Seattle.
Every morning on the Zuiderdam I visited the gym where I slowly pedaled the equivalent of a city block on an exercise bike while binging Netflix downloads on my iPad. Then I wet down my workout clothes and hung them on the clothesline so mom would keep encouraging me to eat a second and third dessert, “you worked up a real sweat at the gym this morning honey, you definitely earned that bread pudding!”
I loved all the little hooks all over that meant I never had to actually put anything away. If it’s hung up, it technically doesn’t count as clutter, right? Although if you want to know the truth, we had so much clutter that we ran out of room for more clutter and had to start hanging things on those hooks or risk spilling out into the hallway.
I loved this medicine cabinet with a closing door. That way I could hide my 12 tubes of sunscreen and act like I’d been in the Mexican sun before without a losing six layers of skin even after clearing the shelves at Walgreens of Aloe Vera (you may recall the great Aloe Vera shortage of 2016 when I first visited Mexico on a cruise).
These robes are almost nice enough to pass as “gala attire” (which is still a thing on Holland America). I say “almost” because Mr. Cruise forgot to wear pants under his (pants are required for men on gala night). I paired mine with my dressiest Crocs and sailed right past the podium though. (I’m serious about the Crocs – they’re one of my favorite cruise hacks.)
The nice thing about rooming with mom is that she never hogs the outlets. She turned off her phone as we embarked the Zuiderdam and didn’t power it back on until we arrived back in San Diego 10 nights later at which point she opened her e-mail to learn that her flight home had been cancelled and she couldn’t get on another one for at least 2 days. At that point she hastily hugged us goodbye, “toodaloo, suckers!” and sprinted to the Zuiderdam check-in desk to book herself on a back-to-back!
That’s actually not what she did at all – that’s what I’d have done. Instead, she took a shuttle to the hotel Mr. Cruise booked for her with a view of the cruise terminal, didn’t even take a single photo of the cruise ships because she doesn’t really know how to use her camera phone, enjoyed a few extra days exploring around San Diego, and flew home two days later. Clearly mom isn’t addicted to cruising OR technology like her spawn (does 23andMe provide information on where one’s cruising gene comes from?).
But mom’s always up for a cruise, even if it isn’t her first love (sorry, Mr. Cruise) and I never have to share any outlets with her! So I had the four USB and two 3-pronged outlets all to myself on the Zuiderdam!
I’m not picky about bath products, I just bum some Head and Shoulders off Mr. Cruise at home and tamp down the frizzies with a baseball cap. But this “Elemis” stuff had me feeling like I should find out what the hell a “blowout” is. I mean, why not go all the way? Next time I’ll know to bring along one of those fake shampoo bottles people use to smuggle booze onto cruise ships. The kind folks at security (who saved the day when I needed to sneak a skateboard onboard – read about that saga HERE) will be confused as to why I’m smuggling on air though.
You can’t call yourself a cruise lover unless you know at least one person who’s died at the cord of one of those horrible too-short cruise ship hair dryers that permanently attach to the wall. Or if you haven’t sought expensive treatment at the ship’s medical center for carpal tunnel syndrome after having held that darn button down. And then you fall into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, “but that one about the cruise lines making money off the hair dryers is TOTALLY true!”
Bonafide cruise lovers will appreciate the hair dryers on the Zuiderdam. They plug into (and more importantly out of) the wall AND have a switch that keeps them on. Maybe you’ll actually go for a dip in the hot tub this time without sporting a shower cap, “Yes, I KNOW this looks ridiculous Fred, but I can’t risk it. Now pass me that bleach shot so I don’t get Covid.”
Have you heard that joke about psychologists and light bulbs? Well it turns out that pursuing an education in cruising through a mediocre, b-list blog will prove infinitely more useful than a Ph.D. in psychology earned through an accredited institution of higher learning. Because I’m here to tell you something that 9+ years of post high-school education did not prepare me for: how to operate the light switches on the Zuiderdam. Here’s the thing. The whole panel is black and it looks like there are three switches, but there are really only two. And after 10 days of constantly pushing on the middle part with no resulting illumination as my patience and self confidence continued to deteriorate, I decided that if I were to ever sail on the Zuiderdam again, I’d slap a little sticker on that middle part reminding me not to press on it. Something really dramatic like this:
I’d also use this thing near the door:
as another hook instead of wasting the time it would have taken me to order, watch them be prepared, and eat 15 buffet crepes (that’s pretty much how I measure everything now) trying to figure out what it did.
I thought it might have something to do with the motion sensor-activated light that came on near the bathroom or the small lights under the closets that stayed on all the time (meaning the cabin never got totally dark, which I also didn’t love), but turning the switch to “off” didn’t affect either of those things.
And I do mean “mini.” Even if you have your room steward empty it of overpriced convenience beverages, the fridge is too shallow to use for the only thing worth having a mini-fridge for: squelching late-night dessert cravings! Seriously, even the smallest plates and blows from the buffet won’t fit in there and I got charged for a Coke because some filling from an unprotected cream puff contaminated it.
You can probably relate to this one as you’re thinking, “this review is trash” and looking around for the can (you just press the little x at the top of your screen).
The trash can was situated all the way under the desk, completely unaccessible behind the heavy desk chair. Every time I moved it to another spot in the room, my room steward would move it back. I blame him for the untidy condition of our room (actually, if it weren’t for him we probably would have received a visit from one of the hazmat-suited crew members, having nothing to do with Covid).
The cloth shower curtain in the bathroom was so evil that I didn’t take a photo of it for fear that it would melt my phone (actually it features in that horrible video from earlier if you must see it, I just forgot to snap a still shot). Seriously though, under normal circumstances you’ll get some water leaking out from under the cloth shower curtain onto the floor, so make sure you pick up items you don’t want to get wet. And if you’re ever innocently rinsing out some shorts when you lose control of the removable shower head, that shower curtain will absolutely NOT keep you afloat like Rose on that door. No, you’ll sink with Jack and the Titanic. Seriously, there was so much water sprayed around the bathroom, with that curtain doing nothing to contain it, that I thought the Zuiderdam sinking as a result might be just the thing to make cruising feel safe again (I mean it would shift attention away from Covid, right?).
I booked this cabin as a “guarantee” meaning I didn’t get to chose my specific location. So I was thrilled when I was assigned 8130, located all the way aft. When I think “aft cabin,” I think of one of those awesome (sometimes wraparound) aft balconies everyone’s always trying to score. So I was pretty disappointed when I discovered this behind the curtains in my stateroom:
I only included that last one about the balcony, so this one would seem reasonable by comparison.
My favorite feature of my balcony cabin on the Eurodam was the bathtub! And as I peaked into propped-open oceanview and balcony staterooms on the Zuiderdam (who agrees that the only reason to take your kids trick-or-treating is so you can see what your neighbors’ digs look like inside?), they all had them too.
I really missed the bathtub in this inside cabin. Did I pay for it? No. Did I still want it? Yes.
Despite the two tulip paintings on the walls (that only served to remind me that I’ve never taken my kid to our local tulip festival to photograph him frolicking to post on Instagram to level-up my parenting cred), I found the decor in our cabin drab and dated. Now before you have the chance to say, “it takes one to know one, ” I shall declare…
Class Dismissed!
Homework (10 points): Check out my other HAL ship and cabin reviews HERE and go HERE to see HAL menus updated for 2022. And don’t forget to follow Prof. Cruise on social media:
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