Nizzie

What company charges this? Ouch!

We only use Lyft and on our last trip from an airport hotel to PE we paid $22 plus tip for a larger vehicle (3 pax, plus bags.) No way would we have paid over $200 for transportation.

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I have a “travel ring” as well, a plain band. My wedding set is a custom-designed beauty that I would be devastated to lose. I dislike washing my hands with it on and I’d be terrified that I’d absent-mindedly set it down in a bathroom and leave it, particularly after a couple of cocktails. If my cheapie travel ring gets lost it’s NBD. I’ve tried traveling bare-handed and that’s even more paranoia-inducing - I would have momentary flashes of panic until I remembered that the ring was safe at home. For me personally, the travel ring has brought me the most peace of mind.

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I have done a Mediterranean cruise and several land trips to various EU countries as well as the U.K. and have never encountered rudeness from locals. That said, when traveling to countries where English is not the primary language, I took the time and care to learn some helpful phrases in the native languages of the countries I’d be visiting, and in the case of our two trips to France, I brushed up my vocabulary and grammar from my years of “school French” from decades long past using the DuoLingo app. The vast majority of the service-industry people we spoke to as a part of our daily tourist activities spoke excellent English and after my often-poor attempts at the local language I’d be rescued posthaste, with a very polite word of praise at my sincere go of it. There were some exceptions when we visited restaurants and shops in the vicinity of our Paris AirBnB (which I purposefully chose for its location a bit outside the usual tourist centers, out in the 10th arrondissement) and some employees were less comfortable with English but we got by on my elementary French, pantomime, and the use of a phone app. In one restaurant, one of the chefs found out he was serving two “Americains” and came out to practice his English with us and had us peruse the menu in English that he was devising for tourists like ourselves that were beginning to appear more often in his establishment.

I also noticed many advertisement posters on the Metro for a school for learning English for the service industry. They outlined that the most lucrative service jobs were bilingual jobs and passable English could make one a good income. Some Parisiens, at least, seem to understand that tourism is a necessary evil and that not all visitors are going to make the effort to fit in by learning a modicum of French.

I cruised with a teenager in 2004 when friends brought their 17yo daughter and when she was excited about an early tour the next day either she put herself to bed at a reasonable hour or she was perky in the a.m. despite her late hours the night before with her newfound friends. If she was “forced” along because her parents thought it would be a good experience for her or because her parents wanted a particular tour and were not willing to compromise for her benefit, she turned into an obstinate, sullen grumpster. It was interesting as an outside mostly-uninvolved observer.

In April I was required to pour out or drink the water that was left in my reusable water bottle before I was permitted to board an NCL ship.

I’m not OP but if my German Catholic side of the family were to have a reunion of all the cousins we would have to have some serious real estate. We have family on the west coast and in the Midwest and just the west coasters number over 150. The Midwesterners are far more numerous as only one small branch of the family tree emigrated west. I’m talking second-, third- and sometimes even fourth-cousins plus various generational removals that we are at least acquainted with.

Some families are downright enormous.

 

Contactless cards are credit cards or debit cards issued by your own bank which have a contactless payment facility.

 

While contactless cards are popular in many places they really haven’t been widely issued here in the US. At this point, chip cards have only been out for a couple of years and not all our point-of-sale systems accept them yet. I have one of the few true chip-and-PIN credit cards available here and many retailers don’t require the PIN. It’s mostly swipe or chip-and-signature in the States still. Many shops that have recently upgraded to allow chip cards may not want to invest again to accept contactless cards.

We have been slow to adopt banking technologies that have become standards elsewhere. We will get them eventually but it will take a while.

Now I’ve heard rumors that the transit system in London accepts contactless payments by smartphone, with Apple Pay and Android Pay and the like. If that is the case then US tourists wouldn’t need to scour the country for a progressive bank - they could just use the phone they already own. Is that true?

Before our 2014 trip to London I signed up for the Groupon there and was able to get deals on the Big Red Bus (one of the hop-on/hop-offs) and a couple of restaurants. After the trip I just unsubbed. We did the HO/HO first thing as we’d gotten a good tip that spending some time outdoors in the fresh air and daylight would help with jet lag.

The Oyster card is definitely the way to get around town - the customer service office in the Terminal 4 station at Heathrow was invaluable in getting us squared away. The representative helped us choose the most appropriate options for our circumstances and gave us tips on how things worked. We found we only really rode the underground at night going back to our flat - during the day we infinitely preferred the bus, as we could see more of the city.

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I’ve done two AK cruises and I froze on my first one. Had to pay a premium to buy a coat in our first port because I was not prepared. Don’t be me.

The next one I went in knowing it could get very cold. I brought base layers, smartest decision ever. It’s a thin, insulating layer of wicking material worn snugly under clothing, much like the long johns of days gone by. We didn’t do anything like glacier hiking so I was able to get away with less of a coat - when out watching the glacier calving on the windy deck I did OK with my base layers and jeans, a turtleneck and a sweater with a raincoat. If going out on a glacier I would bring sock liners and waterproofed shoes.

On NCL there is no need for dressing up on “formal nights” so save your luggage space for your layers.

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I knew that Lyft was cheaper than cabs in my suburb but I had no idea how much cheaper. A taxi one way to the airport from my house is a whopping $68 plus tip. An airport shuttle is $34 for the first passenger and $15 for a second in a shared van that will carry up to seven passengers. A private Lyft car is $30 plus tip. Not only is it cheaper it’s far more convenient. Back when we took cabs the dispatch time was minimum 30 minutes because we are so far outside the city limits. With Lyft we’ve never waited more than 10 minutes for a ride, and unlike cabs the cars have always been clean.

I think in bigger cities where taxis are more plentiful it’s probably less of an issue but out here in the sticks the advent of ridesharing services has been amazing.

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You don’t have the option to shut off that access? I have an iPhone so maybe it’s different, and I won’t use Uber for ethics reasons but I checked my Lyft apps accesses and it has:

Location: While using the app (and I can change it to Never)

Siri & Search: Suggestions On (I can turn off) and Use with Siri Off (I can turn on)

Notifications: On, Badges and Alerts On (I can fully customize)

Background App Refresh: On (I can turn off)

Cellular Data: On (I can turn off)

No mention of accessing contacts or the other commonly requested items (camera and photos). Does anyone with an iPhone have the Uber settings to compare? I refuse to download it myself but I know there are others that use it.

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I’ve been pulled out of line, not off a cruise ship, but at the US-Canada border driving home from British Columbia. I believe it truly was random because when I pulled up the agent was flustered - he’d been told to flag the next vehicle with 2+ passengers for a secondary immigration check but what he thought was a person in my passenger seat was a backpack with a baseball cap fastened to the top. I was sent to park while they figured out how to void the “passenger #2” passport check (thank goodness it wasn’t a customs check where they pull everything out of the car, just a passport and background check so it only took about 15 minutes.)

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We usually stay in a hotel the night before a cruise and I have had good luck having the hotel receive a shipment from Amazon with all our liquid necessities and holding them for us. Mainly sunscreen, because we go through a lot of that.

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If OP mentioned possible forthcoming litigation, said anything like, “You’ll be hearing from my attorney” or otherwise led the RCI team to believe a lawsuit might be coming, it might be corporate policy to cancel any business the complainant has.

Back when I worked in a call center for a large corporation, if a caller said anything like the above we were to terminate the call with a canned spiel about being unable to continue this conversation and no further contact would be permitted until the customer submitted a letter stating they would not bring a lawsuit. Otherwise the only department they could be in contact with was Legal.

Most callers would calm down considerably when presented with this information but we did have a number of hotheads that couldn’t see reason and ended up on our blacklist. It’s just a bad business practice to continue to interact with anyone who has said they will sue you, even if they stand zero chance of actually winning.

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I used to get “land sickness” after cruises. It was weird (just felt like still being on a moving ship but on terra firma) but not debilitating or even that annoying - just weird. It would be mostly gone in a couple of days and two weeks or so post-cruise it would be completely over. I have heard that low doses of some seasickness medications starting a few days pre-cruise and continuing a couple of days after can help prevent symptoms for those prone to it, but for me it was never bad enough to consider medicating for. It was just a periodic odd sensation that never interfered with my daily activities.

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I am sure that the server depended on your mini candy bar to augment their salary.

 

 

 

DON

I was thinking that he depended on it to fuel his early-morning sugar rush. LOL

In reality, we use them to be memorable. We hand them out with singles (usually wrapped around and taped with a tiny piece of tape) to damn near everyone who provides us a service with a smile. We give away just the candy to crew members we see walking around doing their jobs, like paint scrapers and rail polishers. On one trip, the captain came to talk to us in one of the bars, we gave him one and he was tickled pink. By the time the cruise is wrapping up, we are known as “Mr. and Mrs. Kit Kat” all over the ship. It’s a fun onboard hobby/pastime.

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When we did a Med cruise we needed to be off the ship early in order to make our private tours almost every day, so we would get breakfast from room service so we could eat and get ready at the same time. We requested the 6:30-7:00 am window and the first day, our breakfast arrived at 6:55. We tipped $2 plus a mini candy bar, and every day after that it arrived at 6:30.

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I purchased X insurance (actually I purchased pretty much anything the Certified Vacation Planner on the phone suggested as I might have been enjoying my second glass of wine when I booked our cruise) and one month before sailaway I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

As we were perilously close to the pullout date where we would only get 25% of our money back we decided to cancel our trip while we could get a 50% refund and “eat” the rest if need be, so we could make a treatment decision with a clear head (pun maybe intended.)

As it happened I was wheeled into a 4-hour surgery the very morning we would have flown into Miami. This meant we could use the insurance - I did have to provide statements and forms from my primary care doctor, neurosurgeon, and my neurotologist to assure the insurers that the surgery was a necessity and not something elective.

IIRC we got our refund about 2 months after submitting the claim. We rescheduled the cruise for exactly one year after the missed one, and you’d better wager that I got insurance on that vacation as well!

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You will also need to set expectations with your daughter and SIL with regard to how much, if any, childcare you as the grandparents will be doing on this cruise. Friends of mine were in this situation and they had to tell their son and daughter-in-law that if they were coming on the cruise, that as the grandparents, they would babysit ONE night so that the son/DIL could have a date night. Apparently there was some resentment because son/DIL had assumed that my friends would be more than happy to give up all (or at least most) of their evenings to sit with their grandson.

After some tense conversations and negotiations, the son and DIL elected to join my friends, and my friends decided to also help pay for one session of Kids Club daytime babysitting and one session at Night Owls so the four adults could spend time as a group. It was a reasonable compromise.

Whatever you decide, have it outlined with your family before you leave. You don’t want your vacation soured with badly-set expectations.

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My friends say the best way to avoid getting mosquito-bitten is to invite me along on outings. I attract every bug in the area. Since I won’t be on your cruise I recommend repellent just in case.

For myself, I carry a few of these - Bug X 12640 Insect Repellent Towelettes, 25-Count https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051OJ9DO - highly portable, one towelette can be used by at least two people.

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When my husband and I traveled to London in 2014, we found the information desk at the Heathrow Terminal 2 & 3 tube station to be of great help. Instead of buying our cards at the automated kiosk, we stood in a short line to speak to a human. She went over with us the best and most economical way to get where we needed to go, being that the airport is in Zone 6, our AirBnB was in Zone 2, and everything we wanted to visit was in Zone 1 - and we were visiting for 8 days, then traveling elsewhere for 7 days, and back to London for 2 more days with a last trip to Zone 6 for our flight out of Heathrow.

To further complicate matters we had a borrowed Oyster card with about £10 of PAYG credit (an unregistered card that one can legitimately share) so the person helped us determine how much PAYG we’d need to get to/from Heathrow and how to best cover our extra days beyond the 7-day TravelCard we bought for the main part of our visit. At the end of our trip, we turned in the extra Oyster card and transferred the unused balance to the one we’d borrowed. We could have also gotten a refund on it if we’d wanted.

I do know that when we were there, they were installing all the hardware and such for contactless smartphone payment (Apple Pay, Android Pay) and you can use your phone with an Oyster app to load cards/PAYG funds nowadays.

Ask at the airport kiosk! Their whole job is to assist people, mostly tourists, with their transit needs. If you’re not arriving by air, there are information desks at King’s Cross (train) or Victoria Station (coach.)

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Unfortunately the drawers do not always get cleaned out. A friend of mine works in customer service for a cruise line and he received a call from a passenger who, while still in port, found the previous passenger's clothing still in the drawers. She wanted to lodge a complaint with shoreside before going and standing in the massive Guest Services line. (Ship housekeeping was immediately contacted and two stewards were sent to clean the cabin again, because if they missed clothing in the drawers, what else did they miss?)

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Anecdotal evidence only, but I used to get terrible motion sickness as a child - I had to sit in a seat where I could see out the windshield in a car, and I threw up on every plane flight I went on. Even on the school bus, I always sat right up front, staring straight ahead.

Gradually, as I aged, it all just drifted away. I went on my first cruise in the 90s and I have never once had a bout of seasickness - even in particularly rough waters headed to Alaska, while my cabin mate was camping over the commode. Nowadays I can even read in the passenger seat of a car - I frequently will read aloud to my husband as he drives - and there's nary a sign of nausea or discomfort.

Maybe I just outgrew my motion-sickness. Maybe I did grow some "immunity" or the like. Who knows - I did have a tumor removed from my acoustic nerve a few years back that the surgeons said had probably been there for 20-30 years. Perhaps that mass growing and pressing on the vestibulocochlear nerve sheath for so many years acted as a remedy for me. Even after having the tumor removed, though, I still am resistant to standard motion sickness. I haven't been in major swells since, though, so no reports there.

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We don't have kids (which, frankly, is probably a big part of how/why we can afford an annual vacation) but we do budget for our travel. Firstly, we track all our spending. We don't use cash at all, as cash seems to just magically disappear with little to no knowledge of where it might have gone. Every expenditure goes through our credit union debit card or (preferably) rewards credit cards, and the cards get paid off every month - no exceptions. Ever. If we cannot afford to pay off what we plan to spend, we don't spend it.

Our CU online banking site allows us to categorize spending and track by category so we know month to month how much we are spending on groceries vs. dining out, entertainment at home (cable, computer games) vs outside (movies, theater) and such. Each paycheck I pay myself first by setting aside money into a vacation fund. I used to pay into an emergency fund, but once I built up a year's worth of take-home pay I felt I could relax on that. Each year when my annual pay increase hits, I do add to my e-fund until I hit a year of net salary again, but after that I go back to saving for travel.

Our second biggest expenditure each month has always been food, behind only the mortgage in $$ amount. We can't reduce the house payment easily so we focused on cooking at home most of the time and getting the most bang for our buck in the groceries department.

While Reddit can be a real cesspool of humanity sometimes, I've had great luck just lurking their "Eat Cheap and Healthy" subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/

Lots of good ideas although you may have to do some filtering as everyone's idea of "healthy" (and "cheap" for that matter) can be quite different. Once we got our dining-out spending under control we had a lot more flexibility with money.

We have a basic TV package for the networks and supplement with Netflix for a fraction of the price. We had a consultation with a tax accountant to make sure we were getting the most out of my home office (I work out of my house as a telecommuter for a large corporation) and our other deductions - and the fee we paid the guy was deductible! So worth it, we have saved so much on our taxes since then.

I quit my Starbucks habit and got myself some flavored syrups to make my own "fancy" coffees at home - it's not espresso but a big coffee with a splash of cream and a bloop of syrup tastes almost as good for pennies and not dollars.

Both of us moved our cell service from pricy AT&T to much-less T-Mobile because my husband's company is a partner with them so gets a hefty corporate discount. My employer subsidizes my phone so mine is actually -$5 per month - that's right, I get paid to own and use a smartphone. They also contribute toward our home high-speed internet (required for my work) so that's a no-brainer - but we kept the speed at the recommended minimum rather than increasing it. We don't need higher speed so we don't spend more for it.

Probably the best thing I did for myself was to pay off my debt (credit card) before I got married. My husband made it a condition of our relationship, and let me know he wouldn't propose until it was paid off. It was real motivation for me and I worked my tail off to do it - and have been debt-free ever since, except for the house. I even saved up enough in cash to buy my current car, so no car payment either.

If the promise of a big vacation will motivate you and your family to spend less and get out of debt, then go for it. Get the kids involved. My parents were very hush-hush about money when we were young and I think it affected us adversely - I feel that income and budgeting and such should be openly discussed within a family so the kids have a healthy relationship with money when they get older.

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Do you remember the old wringer washers with the rollers? They have something similar on the ship where they roll the clothes thru an industrial roller to get the moisture out of them before placing them in the dryer.

 

 

 

Roz

Bit of trivia: that roller bit is called a "mangle" - an apt description I'd say

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