Review and All Photos by Andrew Hartl

 

Back on board the beautiful Norwegian Pearl Ocean Liner, this time for the Kiss Kruise.  After being on this ship for several music cruises last year, it feels just like coming home.  We set sail from Miami with ports of call in Cozumel, Mexico, and Grand Cayman and spent two days at sea.

The sea days were jam packed with concerts, as well as any form of entertainment that incorporates drinking games and music.  A few examples are the drunken belly flop contest, a different spin on the classic game Battleship where contestants try to sink the opposing team’s fleet of ships, which just happens to be made of Margarita shots.

The first big show of the cruise was with cruise hosts, KISS, performing an unmasked electric version of songs spanning their decades-long history including Christine Sixteen, Firehouse, and others .  Kiss finished the set with Shout It Out Loud.

The pool deck was packed with over 3000 fans representing 34 countries, every last one of them hardcore Kiss fans and a lot of them have been on all 6 of these annual floating concert extravaganzas.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people sporting Kiss tattoos; quite the spectacle.

The merchandise shop was a huge draw for all KISS fans, with everything available from T-shirts to drumsticks, autographed miniature guitars, drums heads, signed prints and coffee mugs, just to name a few.

Liberty tattoo had a shop set up in the casino. A team of artists was busy tattooing cruisers who were eager for lasting memories of the cruise and turned out numerous KISS designs.  And the casino had cruisers lined up to purchase KISS casino chips. There was even a machine that stamped pennies with KISS members’ faces, and that too created a long line.

And in between it all was performance after performance of pure feel-good music.   The photo galleries will tell the story of who played and what the party atmosphere was like.  And while you enjoy those, I’ll try to get my couch to stop swaying because I haven’t got my land legs back yet.