Continuing the tour of the beautiful Celebrity Beyond. I do not normally have as many ship pictures because we normally do duplicate or sister ships and do not think that we need pictures of everything on the ship again. However, the Beyond is new to us, beautiful with so much awesome art, and looks different day and night.
The Rooftop Garden. Beautiful with live plants though no live grass lawn that I had heard about. On the cruise, I heard the Solstice still has the live grass lawn. Then one of the Officers in the Q&A is next going to the Solstice for a massive refit at the beginning of 2026. We are booked on it at the beginning of 2027. I was excited that we would have a like new, refurbished ship and then afraid that they will remove the grass. I have now looked up the planned refit, and it looks like it will primarily benefit the suite and retreat guests.
The Rooftop Garden showed the Texas A&M grass. Our oldest son goes to A&M, so we watched the game. We did not find a seat, but stopped to watch between walking laps and then continued watching in our room. I got a picture of the Corps of Cadets in the stands since our son is in the Corps. All of the Corps goes to home, regular season games, but only some had tickets to the playoff game.
Separately, we learned that the X in Celebrity X is a Greek letter as Celebrity was founded in Greece. When the Captain was introducing the top officers the second night, he said he was from Greece, Chief Engineer from Greece, someone else from Greece, and then Hotel Director, surprise from Scotland.
I liked Eden; it was a nice and relaxing place to sit. Though not all chairs were super comfortable and others were fine. There was a wake view. We enjoyed breakfast here three mornings and went for dessert one day. They had awesome desserts. Lunch was not open on port days, which when seeing the wrong day daily program, I thought they were, so was disappointed. We never made it for lunch; they had paninis and other sandwiches.
Outside of Eden, the famous mirror hall with rocks to not walk through when drunk. I loved the deer outside the hallway.
Peacock outside of a restaurant. Stairwell art. This looked like a color by number where "Beyond" still had the numbers and was uncolored. I liked the elephant art; it was also appropriate because for some reason that stairwell area, deck 6, smelled like elephants.
Ship looking good from the outside. The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Club followed us to two ports -- photo bomber. More on the R-C, look at this crazy staircase. It looks impressive, but does not look very accessible for their potentially older clientele who can afford this cruise.
I think this is one of the $1 million lifeboat that Captain Kate mentioned; look at those fancy seats. It did say that the capacity was 150 as a tender boat and 250 as a lifeboat.
The pool was beautiful at night. The lights changed colors on the pool, Magic Carpet hallway, Champagne hot tubs, and the plastic protruding triangle screen (not pictured). Someone asked about the elephant standing on a man piece. The Captain explained that the ship was built during the covid pandemic, so it was communicating overcoming adversity.
Shrimp tower on the last lunch buffet. The buffet was very large. There six of these center stations and two long side stations. The stations had a couple of repeats, but not many and less than I have seen on other ships. It was a very large buffet with a very large section. Behind the buffet with aft outdoor seating was a pizza station. Travis said that the pizza was just okay and not as good at Princess's, so I did not try it until the end. I thought it had very good sauce. They just had cheese when I got it when I would normally pick pepperoni, so I cannot get a complete review. Also, on another slide toward the forward was the dessert station and further the ice cream station. Ice cream was good; I tried and liked cinnamon ice cream. They had cookies too. I got a good chocolate chip and peanut butter. Then later I got another peanut butter that was not good; seeing both at the Cafe side by side, I determined that I had gotten the gluten free. Chocolate chip cookies did not return to the ice cream station and the bad peanut butter stuck around too much. The Cafe also had cookies and very good brownies. However, I got a second brownie later, and it had too many nuts, diluting the brownie flavor. They also had medium sized donuts that were good and that I got to take to morning trivia a couple of days.
Outside day shots.
