Our adventure started on Thursday, October 2.  We headed to San Francisco and, after standing in a very long line to check-in, we made our way aboard the Norwegian Sun.  The boat is enormous.  Our room was not. 

All jokes aside, our room was just the right size for us, but all of you probably already know that staterooms on cruise ships are notoriously tiny (especially the bathrooms).  After getting aboard the ship, we dined at buffet for lunch while our rooms were being prepared.  I probably should point out now that Norwegian has this policy of “freestyle cruising,” which is much more relaxed than traditional cruises.  This means that you don’t go to a main dining room every night for dinner where you are assigned a table, that you don’t have to get dressed up for anything, and that food is served pretty much whenever you are hungry.  The buffet always featured the same items for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.  There was very little variation.  The restaurants all had set menus, but a couple of them did vary day to day.

I wrote down and took photos of every meal that I ate while on vacation.  I did my best to find vegan options, but I found this to be extremely difficult while on board.  Everything was pre-made, even at the restaurants.  It was impossible to request the vegetarian option without the cheese, for example.  On land, I had a much easier time and, sometimes, you really do have to relax a little, especially with a language barrier making it difficult to effectively communicate exactly what you do and don’t eat.

The thing that complicated my dining experiences even more than the language barrier was the fact that veganism is such an alien concept to most of Mexico (and to NCL).  People asked me if vegetarian meant that I still ate fish.  Well, no.  The vegetarian option at most places we went was something stuffed with cheese.  That doesn’t work either.  The restaurants we went to in Mexico had staff that spoke excellent English and I was able to ask for a vegetarian option without the cheese.  I assumed (stupidly) that this would communicate the fact that I don’t want any dairy in my meal whatsoever, but the end result sometimes tasted of butter.  Good thing I was on vacation– it made me all the more relaxed about everything, including stuff like that.  Now that I’m back home, I’m back to a strict vegan diet.  I feel better now than I did the entire time we were gone.  At home, we only eat organic produce (with very few exceptions) and, on the boat, this just wasn’t possible.  It’s amazing how different I feel eating the way I typically eat compared to how I ate for those 11 days.  And it wasn’t just psychological.

Thursday, October 2; Embarkation Day

Lunch, Buffet:

Steamed rice; dal; Indian curry eggplant dish; fruit; french fries; bread; salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Dinner, Four Seasons (one of the main dining restaurants):

Marinated Roasted Pineapple

• aged rum, coconut cream, mint, mojito vinaigrette with sugar cane

While the menu description sounded great, this was a total letdown.  It tasted EXACTLY like canned pineapple.

Madras Vegetable Curry

• basmati rice, mango chutney, pappadam

This dish was good, but the portion was too small to be satisfying.  The rice also tasted very buttery.  When compared to the meat dishes, the vegetarian dishes were about half the amount in terms of portion size.

Dinner #2 (the portions were too small), Pacific Heights (restaurant):

I was still hungry after my child-size portion of dinner, so we headed up to Pacific Heights, which is the healthiest of all the dining facilities.  Nutrition information for all the dishes is listed in the menu and the food was the best of all the places to eat.  The downside to Pac Heights is that they only had one menu and they were only open for dinner and you had to have a reservation.

Lentil Soup– just veggies and lentils.  This was delicious and I had it a couple of times during our trip.

Veggie Pizza, no cheese or pesto.  It was pretty much tomato sauce, shallots and bell peppers.  Excellent crust, but the rest of the pizza was pretty lackluster.  I only ate a few bites.  At this point, I found it easier to tell my waiter or waitress that I had a dairy allergy and that I didn’t eat meat.  When it comes to allergies, they are very diligent and will prepare something special to accommodate.

Friday, October 3; Sea Day

Breakfast, Buffet:

Country potatoes; baguette with strawberry jam; fruit; oatmeal; tea; apple juice.  Nothing super exciting.

Lunch, Buffet:

Fries; bread; olives; salad with Italian dressing.

Dinner, Buffet:

Bread; rice; Indian curry; corn & black bean relish; salad with beans and asparagus, Italian dressing; olives; fruit.

Today, Kendal and I had appointments at the spa for manicures and pedicures.  It was so relaxing and so fun, but extremely expensive.  Oh well.  If you can’t have outrageously priced mani’s and pedi’s on vacation, when can you have them?!

Saturday, October 4; Sea Day

Breakfast, Buffet:

Whole wheat toast with PB&J; fruit; country potatoes; pineapple and orange juice

Lunch, Buffet:

French fries; spinach salad with corn and kidney beans, Italian dressing; Indian curry; rice; pineapple; Asian stir fry veggies.

Dinner, Le Bistro (French restaurant, $10 cover charge per person):

As part of our “Honeymoon Package,” we were able to eat at Le Bistro without a cover charge.  We probably wouldn’t have eaten there otherwise.  The restaurant was gorgeous and we enjoyed our romantic table for two.

Frisée Salad

• Frisée with figs, candied walnuts, roquefort and panchetta with a lemon-mustard vinaigrette (I ordered mine sans roquefort and panchetta, of course)

Vegetable Napoleon

• Baby portobella with roasted red peppers and a beurre blanc sauce (should have been on puff pastry, but we ordered ours without the goat cheese that it came with and they made this one special for us.  Had I known that they were going to make it special, I would have requested no sauce as well.  I ended up eating around the sauce.)

Lime Sorbet– the menu said SORBET, but I was served sherbet.  Yuck!  All I could taste in it was the dairy.  It’s funny how going without dairy products makes it stand out in dishes tainted with dairy.

After dinner snack at the buffet (the portions were small… I was still hungry):

Tofu and veggies wrapped in filo dough (not super tasty, but I was surprised to see such a dish at the buffet); toffee cookie.

Let me explain the cookie.  I had originally wanted to take some of these vegan cookies with me.  At the last minute, I reasoned with myself that it would actually do me some good to not have any sweet treats while on vacation.  Big mistake!  When there wasn’t any dessert that I could have (and after getting my hopes up over the sorbet only for it turn out to be tainted), I wanted them all.  I settled on the cookie after convincing myself that it was possible that it could have been made with margarine or shortening instead of butter.  In fact, it wasn’t buttery tasting at all.  One of a few slip-ups.

Sunday, October 5; Mazatlan

Breakfast, Buffet:

Fruit; oatmeal; baguette with strawberry jam; country potatoes; grilled tomato (gross); pineapple juice.

Lunch, Margaritas Restaurant, Mazatlan:

Margarita, with salt, on the rocks (they spoke excellent English and told us that they used filtered water for the ice).

I explained my dietary situation and they were gracious enough to make a veggie fajita, which consisted of mushrooms, carrots, green beans and tomatoes.  It was delicious (especially after only eating cruise food up until this point), albeit a tad buttery.  I was so excited for some yummy Mexican food that I didn’t mind the butter.

After our lunch, we went to the beach and Kendal and I played in the waves.  The water was SO incredibly warm and the beach we were on was very clean.  We found a beachfront resort that didn’t mind us using their cabanas so long as we kept the drinks coming.  I really had such a fun time here and I even found some special seashells to bring home to my Emma.

Dinner, Las Ramblas (restaurant on the boat):

Las Ramblas was the tapas restaurant on the ship.  I would call our stop here more of a pre-dinner snack.  Crostini with olive tepenade (delicious!), chips and salsa (nothing special), and green and black marinated olives.  For dinner dinner, I hit the buffet for some pasta with marinara and a side salad.  I found it easier to eat at the buffet most of the time because I would pick what I wanted to eat and I didn’t have to explain myself all the time.  The pasta was actually really good.

Monday, October 6; Sea Day

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with brown sugar, raisins and walnuts; watermelon and honeydew; baguette (just a slice) with strawberry jam; tea; pineapple juice.

I fell in love with this oatmeal and had it pretty much every day.  Yum!  With all the different toppings, it really was quite filling.  Some days they had pecans and dried bananas.  I loaded up whatever I could find.

To pass the time today, we did a Boys vs. Girls shuffleboard tournament.  Kendal and I against Travis and Matt.  The boys won.

Lunch, Room Service:

I’m not a room service kind of gal, but I had to try it out just once to cover all the bases of cruise ship dining.  The menu was pretty small consisting mostly of unhealthy things like hot dogs, pizza, etc.  Pretty much no vegetables.  As an aside, I read once that most Americans don’t eat enough fiber.  After being on this boat and seeing how most Americans eat, I believe it!  I saw a guy one morning at breakfast load up his place with ham, sausage and bacon– pretty much an entire pigs worth– then top it off with about 4 fried eggs.  I’m not kidding.  Most people on the ship ate like this.  Crazy!

So for room service, I ordered the Greek Salad without the feta and the Vegetable Pizza without the cheese.  Both were surprisingly very good and they didn’t take that long to get to me.

Dinner, Buffet:

I made a note in my book at the entry for this meal that I was so tired to cruise food.

Dinner was a salad with kidney and garbanzo beans, beets, tomatoes and corn with balsamic dressing; tempura veggies (carrots, broccoli, cauliflower), fried rice (no egg) with corn, peas and carrots; spaghetti with marinara; pineapple and grapes; white chocolate cookie.

Yes, that sounds like an enormous amount of food, but I didn’t consume a lot of each one item.  I had small little tastes.

Tuesday, October 7; Acapulco

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with brown sugar, raisins and walnuts; country potatoes; pineapple and orange juice; tea.

After breakfast, we got off the boat and explored Acapulco.  We had a lot of time to spend here- we debarked at around 9 am and had to be back by midnight.  Our first stop was to see the cliff divers perform, which was SOOOO awesome to watch.

The few things that really made me sad about Acapulco was the amount of litter on the beaches and the pollution in the ocean, and the amount of stray animals.  Dogs and cats were everywhere (and dog poopies were all over the sidewalks).  It was gross and horribly depressing.

After seeing the cliff divers, we took a cab way across town to the Fairmont Princess Hotel, which is situated on a pristine, immaculate beach.  No litter, no sludge floating on top of the ocean.  Here, we found a cabana on the beach and had a few margaritas.

Kendal, Travis and I rented boogie boards from a guy on the beach and tried catching waves for about half an hour.  I think we ended up catching one or two each.  It’s a lot harder than I remember it being.

After a day at the beach, we were all hungry and went back to a restaurant that our cab driver recommended.  He said that he doesn’t eat meat, so I had high hopes for this place.  Well, it’s a seafood restaruant that served nothing but seafood, so when our cab driver said he didn’t eat meat, he obviously meant land animals.  I had some rice and chips and guac, which were all good.

As we walked back to our boat, we stopped at this restaurant, which seems to be a chain throughout Mexico.  It’s called 100% Natural Restaurant.  They offer a wide variety of dishes, some are vegetarian and some are meat, and they make fresh juices.  OMG!  My kind of place for sure!  I ordered the vegetarian tacos, which was a whole wheat tortilla piled up with some faux meat of some sort and piled high with fresh spinach drizzled with their house sauce.  It was very good, but after eating the rice and chips at the first place, I had a hard time eating just one of these gigantic tacos.

The best part of my meal was this juice.  I ordered the “Bali” which was a concoction of pineapple, spinach, lime and orange juices.  It was insane!  I have to make this at home sometime.

We ate lunch so late in the day that we ended up skipping dinner.

Wednesday, October 8; Zihjuatanejo

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with raisins, walnuts and brown sugar; fruit; country potatoes.

Lunch, 3 Amigos Restaurant, Zihjuatanejo:

This place was in the downtown area, right were the boat docked.  Our boat docked way out and we took little boats to the pier.  Of all the cities we visited in Mexico, this was by far my favorite.  Everything was very clean, the people were nice and the town was charming.  I will make it back here one day.

Frozen margarita, with salt.  So refreshing!

Our waiter spoke fluent English.  I explained my dietary dilemma to him and he arranged for me to have veggie fajitas (just peppers and onions), served with some beans and rice.  The beans were amazing.  They had big chunks of garlic in them and they were so good.  Yum, yum yum.  They also had the best tomatillo salsa.

It was a very short day here– only a few hours– so we didn’t do much exploration.  There was a flea market near the pier and I was able to pick up some locally grown organic coffee as well as some organic vanilla to bring back for people.

Dinner, Pacific Heights:

Lentil soup (again!); salad with pears and walnuts (no cheese, no turkey); spaghetti with marinara (no meatballs).

This meal was delicious.  The pasta here was way better than the pasta at the buffet.

Thursday, October 9; Puerto Vallarta

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with brown sugar, dried bananas and pecans; country potatoes; muffin (probaby not vegan, but I was going crazy for a new breakfast food).

After debarking, we headed across the street to Walmart.  Yes, our boat dock was directly across the street from Walmart and Sam’s Club.  We needed a few things, so it was actually really convenient.

From there, we walked around the pier area, which also happens to be the hotel district, and randomly found a bar owned by a Canadian.  We were wandering aimlessly and it was so hot and humid, so we stopped in for a beer.  He was super nice and we ended up chatting with him for over an hour.  The best part was that our beers (I had one, Matt had two) only cost us $7.50 (US).  After hydrating, we wandered aimlessly down the street some more.  We made it about 50 feet before running into another interesting fellow to talk to.  We spent probably another hour talking to this guy, Hugo.  He’s a travel agent and he convinced us to organize a group tour the next time we visit Mexico.  It sounds like the best way to really experience Mexico since my biggest complaint about the cruise was that we spent about 90% of our time on the boat.

Matt and I took a taxi to the PTL, which is the shopping area for native Puerto Vallartans.  This was definitely “experiencing Mexico,” and we enjoyed walking around the shops.  After a while, we took another taxi to the downtown touristy area.  We were starving and found a fantastic Cuban restaurant to eat lunch at.

Lunch, La Bodeguita del Medio, Puerto Vallarta:

While finding their website so that I could provide you all with a link, I have learned that this is a chain restaurant and there is one in Palo Alto, which is about 10 miles from my house.  What a small world!

To start, we each had a mojito.

Our waitress didn’t speak a lot of English, but with my broken Spanish we were able to put together a yummy meal.  We had Cuban yellow rice (which probably wasn’t vegan now that I think about it), black beans, fried plantains and a mixed salad.  Everything was delicious!

I’ve decided that our next vacation spot will have to be a French speaking country since that is the only foreign language that I am pretty fluent at.

Dinner, Buffet:

Rice; mixed veggie curry; steamed carrots and broccoli; fruit; salad with honey mustard dressing (I got SO tired of salad and SO tired of their vinaigrettes that I had to switch it up; the honey mustard dressing was my other slip-up).

Friday, October 10; Sea Day

Thanks to Norbert today turned into another Sea Day when it was supposed to be a stop in Cabo.  Just judging from the waves and wind that hit us when we were hundreds of miles from the storm, I’m glad we didn’t stop.  Still, I was really looking forward to seeing Cabo since I’ve never been.

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal; baguette with jam; fruit; country potatoes.  I have to add that the country potatoes are not that good, but I couldn’t stop myself from eating them nearly every morning.  There was something strangely addicting about them.

Lunch, Buffet:

Salad; slice of grainy bread with raisins; cucumber salad (marinated cucumbers, fennel and onions– really delicious); and tabbouleh salad.

Dinner, Il Adagio (restaruant with cover charge):

The appeal of this restaruant is that it is on the 5th floor of the boat, which puts the tables at about sea level and there is an entire wall of windows.  Amazing views!

It was at this point that I felt the nervous breakdown coming.  I felt like I was in the Shining, except that my boat wasn’t haunted and there were more people around.  I was going crazy.  I wanted to be able to order something on the menu without having to customize it.  This is what was about to send me over the edge.  All of the vegetarian options were premade and I couldn’t order any without cheese, which all of them contained.  There was very little flexibility there, and very little accommodation from the waitstaff and chefs.  The only way to get around it was to fake a dairy allergy so that they would actually be concerned for my safety instead of just willing to make me something vegan because I am a guest and that’s what I want.  It started to wear on me.  Add on top of that the fact that all of the waitstaff is from a country other than the U.S. where English may not be their primary language (and where veganism is a totally weird concept) and you can understand why I started to get cranky towards the end.

At the end of the day, it was incredibly eye-opening to see what it is like everywhere else, since I live a very sheltered life here in the liberal Bay Area.  Veganism is totally accepted here, even if people don’t really understand it.  We have several varieties of non-dairy milks available at regular grocery stores (I checked for soy and rice milk and Walmart and found only one brand of soy milk).  I really am very spoiled.

Lucky for me, just when I was about to lose it, some dolphins started jumping in our waves.  So many of them.  The first group of dolphins would leave and more would suddenly appear.  It really put me at ease.

For dinner, I ordered the Insalata Tricolore, which was a mix of radicchio, frisée, cherry tomatoes and mushrooms topped with a balsamic vinaigrette.  The dressing was delicious!

Next, I had a pizza.  I told our waiter to have the chef leave off the cheese, but pile on whatever veggies they had.  It turned out really tasty.

Dessert was canteloupe sorbet– and it really was sorbet this time.  Very refreshing!

Saturday, October 11; Sea Day

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with brown sugar, raisins, pecans and walnuts; blackberries (frozen); tea; pineapple juice.

Lunch, Buffet:

Salad; cucumber, tomato and pickle sandwich; lentil salad (very good!).

Dinner, Pacific Heights:

Lentil soup; spaghetti with marinara (no meatballs).

Sunday, October 12; Sea Day

This was our last sea day before arriving back in San Francisco.  I was so excited to get home and to see my Emma.  To pass the time in the morning, Matt and I played cards.  I think he won most games.  I had a freshly squeezed carrot orange juice and it was delicious.

Breakfast, Buffet:

Oatmeal with brown sugar, almonds, pecans, walnuts and raisins; fruit; tea.

Lunch, Buffet:

Indian veggie curry (was very, very, very oily); coconut rice; roasted sweet potato and squash (yum); salad.

Dinner, Four Seasons (main dining restaurant):

Veggie soup (was very good).

Tomato basil salad– the menu specified “vine ripened tomato,” but this clearly was not.  The basil part of it was pesto, but I let that slide.

Veggie tempura with wasabi rice and scallion-ginger dipping sauce.  The tempura was very good (although not filling at all), but the rice was nasty.  The only flavor to it was butter; I didn’t taste any wasabi.

The one thing I did differently here was ask for margarine… well, actually, Travis asked for it.  To my surprise, they brought a little dish of it to the table so that I didn’t have to eat dry bread again.  That was a nice luxury item to find.  Kendal also checked with the Java Bar to see if they had any soy milk and they did!  The only problem is that they use it in coffee drinks and wouldn’t know how to charge me for just a cup of soy milk.  That was a bummer, but it really was fine with me since I don’t really care for most soy milks anyway.

One would think, though, that if they stocked their Java Bar with soy milk, presumably for those who do not consume dairy for one reason or another, that they would also offer non-dairy options elsewhere.  I had a hard time believing that I was the only non-dairy person on the boat.

Other than my issue with the food, we really had a great time on our trip.  If we ever take another cruise, I don’t think we’ll go for as long as we did this time, since most of our time was spent on the boat.  I would much rather have spent more time at the ports.