Cruising Gluten Free - What we learned

Disclaimer - The thoughts below are my own and how things are done were specific to our cruise ship if not the cruise line. I would talk to the front desk about what to do once you get on the ship.

To those of you that know me, you t=know that I have been Gluten Free since mid-2013. Mum went Gluten Free before me and when I had gained a lot of weight quite quickly had encouraged me to try cutting out gluten to see if that was the cause. Luckily for me within 2 weeks of cutting down on gluten, I had lost most of the weight that I had gained, and I have been Gluten Free ever since. 

Now being Gluten free at home is getting easier, most of the takeout places have options and the supermarkets are getting more of a variety of products so that we don;t have to feel like we are not missing out on anything. Travelling Gluten Free is a different story.

We were lucky that the airline that we flew up to Vancouver had a Gluten Free meal option and once we got to Vancouver we found some places in the food court of the mall that had Gluten Free options as well. We knew that as long as we could find somewhere that sold fries or salads that we would be able to eat. At least while we were on land that was. It was once we got on the ship that we were not certain what we could eat or even how to go about making our dietary requirements known.

The day that we boarded the ship, we went down to the front desk to ask what we needed to do as we had no information on what to do and there was nothing mentioned in the booklets that were waiting in the cabin for us. While at the front desk the person who was serving us called up to the dining room to ask what we needed to do. She advised that the main procedure was that we needed to choose what we were going to have for dinner the night before or at the latest at breakfast that morning. After telling us this she sent us up to the dining room to talk to the dining room manager to get the men's for the next night. 

This was how we chose our dinners for the remainder of the cruise. At dinner between courses, we were given the menu for the next night and were told to choose what we wanted from the menu and they would make it gluten free for us. This was great. There were very few things that we could not get gluten free and even then it was mostly the desserts. The dining room staff were very accommodating and we had our favourite servers by the end of the cruise and one of the hosts even knew our stateroom number off by heart by the second night. 

Breakfasts and lunches were a different story from dinner. I had breakfast in the dining room twice and mum once. As we could not preorder our meals for breakfast there was a long waiting time for the food to be made so it was not a good option for those who were already hungry when they got to the dining room. One morning after we had our breakfast delivered to the room, and had rock hard toast mum went up to the buffet to see what she could get up there. That was when she discovered that the options that they had were far better than in the dining room and were much quicker as well. The options included waffles, toast and English muffins amongst other things. From that day on, we decided that we would be having breakfast in the buffet for the rest of the cruise as we liked those options better.

Lunch was mostly had at the buffet as well. The buffet on our ship had a salad bar as well as other gluten-free options. There was one place at the buffet where they had Mexican options, as well as a make your own pasta place that had all the gluten-free options. We mostly had tacos and the pasta dish as we knew that we could get them gluten-free. The salad bar was a pretty good option however at our first lunch on the ship we had a salad and they asked us about dietary restrictions after putting the dressing on which contained gluten, so we did not trust that place anymore. Another place that we liked for lunch was the burger place. This place used the gluten-free English muffins as their burger buns and the vegetarian burger was pretty good. 

Snacking on the ship was pretty hard for us, that is until we found out that they had gluten-free cookies and we could have as many as we liked. I had also picked up some cheesy popcorn when we were in Juneau so that kept us in savoury snacks.

Now people who drink alcohol and are gluten-free know what alcohol they can drink and what they can't, so navigating the bar is just like navigating bars on land. 

The best advice that we have for those who are gluten-free and cruising is that you should talk to the front desk as soon as you get on the ship to find out what you need to do before you head into the main dining room; and that in our experience in the buffet the Gluten Free options are kept in the same place for every meal so that once you find it, you just keep going back to the same part of every meal.