Nyrina4life

Booked for the April 2nd departure! My husband and I are super excited. This will be our first Disney cruise. :)

Wow, sure looks like I'm in a minority with my opinion. I didn't mean to offend anyone. I was just stating my thoughts. You all have valid thoughts. I guess I should take a refresher course in english too :p:D.

For me, the letter made me a little sad. I imagine it may be hard for them to find the right balance?? You may have some within the company who feel that increasing prices, and bringing back some of the 'wow' factor would play well to their image, and then you have the others who want to ensure every cabin is filled. That just means a cut in services that wowed people, and keeping fairly cheap prices.

Everyone is welcome to their own opinion, and these things seem pretty personal and magical to you. Little things really do make a difference, regardless what people say.

Hopefully, someone will consider some adjustments. Also, just remember that if the company ever gets in hot water and needs to be turned around, they'll hire someone and that is the person who will usually be more likely to listen to what loyalist have to say. :o

Loving all these positive reviews!! We just contacted them, and have been communicating back and forth. They are the only tour company that has responded promptly (I have tried other tour companies in other cities and heard NOTHING). Just hope more people for the 28th of June departure want to do the tour =3 so far its just the two of us for their semi-private tour, and we need more.

Based on information regarding Barcelona posted by English_in_Spain and also Tripadvisor reviews we selected the Hotel Barcelona Universal. We loved the location as it is not in a touristy area and has easy access to the metro. Our rate included a great breakfast buffet which included a wide selection of both hot and cold items. We would stay there again with no qualms.

Been searching for a cruiser to mention this hotel!! We booked Hotel Barcelona Universal as well, based on tripadvisor and hotels website reviews. Sadly our travel agent was unhappy and worried for us! Glad to see a positive review.

Did you have an easy time getting to port from the hotel?

We used our CC for the initial down payment, but we're hoping that people will contribute to the honeymoon fund. If not, we'll pay the rest in cash.

Wow! I think I gotta show my hubs this cruise for next year. Totally up our alley. Nerdcore! MC Frontalot, Wil Wheaton, board games like Pandemic, and drinking! Haha :D

Haha! I know, right?! I wouldn't mind going on this cruise with my Fiance. :D

Awesome review so far! Your photos are fantastic, and I am in total agreement on some of those fees. Can't wait to read the rest of your review and see the gorgeous photos. :D

During my first cruise, I was excited to dress up. I ended up buying a nice dress shirt and matching skirt.

I am actually looking forward to being able to wear my black dress, as I plan to be down to that size by cruise. I like formal nights, and that is crazy because in the past, I hated to get all dressy. It feels special on a cruise.

Since there are going to either be 2 or 3 formals nights, my dresses will be black the first night, green the next and maybe tangelo the final (or during our celebration dinner).

Casual is anything goes for me, so slacks and a nice shirt [shrug].

Dubrovnik (last part)

Back on the ship we enjoyed our park café lunch and got ready for our second part of the day. We wanted to go snorkelling. Tarik had no desire what so ever to join us, since it would be a stony cliff entrance into the sea again, something he absolutely had no intention on ever doing again. He preferred to stay on the ship to play basketball and tabletennis…So be it -- nothing worse than having a grumpy teenager along for the day.

So Tanja and I left the ship once again to take the bus to Old Town. Past lunch time the busses where a lot less crowded. We only took our snorkelling gear, cabin towels, sea pass and Dubrovnik cards with us, since we planned on leaving our stuff on shore to go snorkelling together. So no own photos – sorry.

Our snorkelling spot:

If you look at a map of Dubrovnik, you see Old town as a circular blob at the bottom right. To the bottom left, one bay apart from Old Town, you see a fortress on a cliff that sticks out into the sea. Our goal was to find the bay left to that fortress. The bay looks like an arrowhead.

This is a picture showing our bay and the fortress during rough weather.

Foreign picture:

 

Foreign picture:

Isn’t this beautiful?

But how to get there? We took the bus all the way to Old Town again and started walking back uphill. The next possible street you take a left and you get to a split parking lot…half of it leads uphill and half of it level ground to the left. We decided to walk on uphill and were rewarded with our first view of the bay we were looking for:

Foreign picture:

Mhhh, but how do we get down there? The parking spot was a dead end road. No walk ways down to the water. So we headed back to the other section of the lot. Here there are some partially hidden stairs leading downhill in front of the houses. We trotted down there…down seemed good … the sea had to be there somewhere and glimpsed through a stone gate to the right. And there it was -- the entrance to our paradise for this afternoon.

But one thing was different from all the pictures we found online…it was burstling with beach life. There were tons of kids jumping in of a rock, little kids playing soccer on the tiny space in front of the water and two waterball teams in the water having a blast. On the rocks to the sides, there were many towels with people sunbathing on them. Would it be fun to go snorkelling here? Surely with all this racket there wouldn’t be a fish in sight?

We wanted to try anyway. Getting into the water was painful…the cobblestones all seemed to have the ONE size to hurt under your feet. Today I envied Tanja for her water shoes. But we made it into the water afterall (Later on we saw, that there was a much easier spot to enter on the side with a ladder…oh well). Once in the water we snorkelled away past the real shallow rocks and the waterball square. Out here there were no more people and we basically had the whole bay to ourselves. And it was WOW! The water was crystalclear and there were all kinds of different fish. Real small ones in huge groups, which shimmered and parted once you swam through them. Huge white ones with a little black on the sandy ground way way below us and all kinds of different ones close to the rocks on the sides. It was heavenly. We snorkelled forever and loved every second of it. Sometimes we would halt and take out our snorkels to talk to each other and share what we saw. During one of those chats, paddling in this beautiful spot, we saw this ship (saw it in the morning in the harbour as well and asked ourselves if it was just there to be pretty or if it actually leaves the port) sail by really close.

We saw only this ship, no other people, no other boats -- just the scenery with the fortress high on top and this ship sailing by silently. We felt as if we time travelled into a long past century. It was magical!

Our bay proved to be just right for us. I don’t know if there are any facilities like restrooms or showers here though. We didn’t need them or look for them. If you look at the following picture of the bay, you see two doors in the rocky side…maybe that’s a place to check out if you’re looking for one or the other? Anybody ever been there?

Foreign pic:

Well, anyway, the bay for us was a huge success. We LOVED the snorkelling here and DEFINITELY will snorkel in Croatia again. Lol – I ripped my bikini on one of the rocks – it was so bad I had to throw it away afterwards – but it was such a wonderful day, that not even that could lessen my mood. We leisurely strolled back to the bus station and rolled back to the ship. The busses are very frequent and not as crowded in the afternoon as before noon time.

Once back on the port area, we did some last minute souvenir shopping and sat down in the one bar/internet café they have there. We still had a little time left until the time we arranged with Tarik to meet up. We decided to try a local beer. You can pay with Euros within the port. Half a litre on tap beer for 1 €. Now that’s a bargain! Needless to say we enjoyed two of them! The lady behind the counter was very nice and I believe I‘ve never seen so many smiling faces than in our stop in Dubrovnik (of course not counting the stressed out gazillion tourists).

We really liked the feel of this country and town, even if we didn’t get to experience a whole lot. But it was enough to stir the wish to return.

What I learned in Dubrovnik:

As soon as we’re not bound to the school holidays anymore, we’ll travel in the off season.

Croatian beer sure is yummy.

Snorkelling here rocks!

If you’re doing DIY trips it would sure help to have at least rudimentary knowledge of the local language.

Don’t swim too close to rocks if you don’t have extra swim gear.

More to come!

Love your review so far. The third from the bottom photo looks like a scene from Game of Thrones.

Thank you for sharing such an awesome review of the ports, and ship.