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Nope, even when some women’s clothing looks like it has pockets very often they’re fake or too small to be any use. But women”s summer wear with pockets is vanishingly. I do the orders for my family’s shop and any time I spot a skirt or dress with pockets I order it, thankfully I’m dealing with surf fashion so all the boardshorts (surf shorts) have pockets for wax combs or fin keys. The clear plastic card pockets for lanyards are fine if you never need to remove the card but the card tends to try stuck in them when you need to hand it over. I got a phone case on a lanyard and attached a card holder to that, very handy, alternatively you can get a hard plastic card holder that will attach to a lanyard. It’s much easier to take a card out of that rather than the clear plastic.

Bear in mind final payment is a lot later for customers in Europe so pricing can keep changing long after North American customers make their final payments.

Ocean blue used to do lobster or crab rolls for lunch on a sea day, and Moderno did a theme lunch on a sea day on the breakaway/+ class ships pre covid. the fact that hasn’t happened since the resumption has to be at least partially due to staff or supply shortages as well as them only getting back to hitting max capacity during spring break this year.

On one of my cruises it was mid-term break for a lot of French schools and Quebec so there were a bunch of french speakers aboard and that was a sailing from Miami.

Most Europeans wouldn't think twice about considering a hotel room safe as secure. A lot of older hotels here don't even have a room safe. When I traveled for work in my previous career a lot of the hotel room safes weren't big enough for a laptop so I had to lock it in my suitcase instead. Heck I'm going to have that issue with my camera kit on my next cruise, there's no way all of it would fit in the safe. At the pre-cruise hotel at least some of it will be locked into a suitcase.

My very first cruise was on Escape and I had such a good time I'd booked my next within a week of getting home. The waterfront is a nice relaxed outdoor area and the bars there are non-smoking unlike Spice. However the cooling grotto in Spice on Escape is a nice spot on a hot day.

I bring mine if going on a warm weather cruise but I'm from Ireland and suffer from heat rash. I can't deal with hot AND humid at all. You know your own heat & exertion tolerances best.

I took covid cancellations FCC from NCL and used it across 2 cruises after the resumption. I did wind up passing on a cruise next voucher purchased before covid to a friend as I couldn’t use it before it expired. I generally only cruise once a year and normally book well in advance so I pay attention to expiry dates and any opportunity to use multiple fcc/cruise next vouchers.

They will list other excursions that don’t overlap the time for the excursion you already booked. Some excursions are setup as 0 minutes duration, these are usually things like the HOHO buses, viewpoint trams/gondolas. For example I’ve booked the goldbelt tram in Juneau as well as a whale watching excursion. On a Mediterranean cruise I did previously I booked 2 excursions at Livorno but the first was so badly delayed by a traffic accident on the normal route we didn’t get back to the ship until the 2nd excursion return time, both were NCL excursions so they refunded me for the 2nd excursion that was missed. I travel solo so I don’t know how the excursion selection works for a cabin with multiple guests. If this wasn’t a cruiseline (with all of their inherently illogically programmed IT) I’d say the obvious thing should be that each guest can select their own excursions. Where there could be restrictions is if there are u18/21s in the cabin as they’re unlikely to be able to book onto an excursion without an adult companion.

I went hunting for saline nasal spray at my local pharmacy here once and it wasn’t easy to come by, then! But now it’s top of the advice list from doctors here as part of the routine to deal with hay fever. I always got dry sinuses from long haul flights but having worn the face mask last time it reduced it massively. Also bring some basic first aid supplies, I tripped and skinned a knee in Tortola and by pure fluke I had some dressing and tape in my bag for other reasons, and used hand sanitizer as antiseptic. Bringing things that can double up for non-obvious uses is a good way to cover eventualities, like my hand sanitizer.

you can often find reviews on trip advisor, sometimes the excursion names are identical to those used by NCL but not always so it can take a bit of digging. Helpfully trip advisor has a "shore excursion" filter that you can use, or if looking at the reviews you can filter with keywords like "cruiseline"

For future planning you can get non-liquid mouthwash, Listerine does a couple and Lush cosmetics have some too, Lush also do tablet form toothpaste. Just in case you're bumping up against your liquids limits if traveling by air with carry-on only.

I spotted that pedestrian bridge when I was booking my pre-cruise hotel, I'll be at the Belltown inn so it's a straight shot downhill all the way from the hotel to the ship. The bridge is at the junction of Bell Street and Elliot Avenue. It is listed in google as a 9 minute walk from that hotel to Pier 66.

Unfortunately NCL seem to be incapable of adapting their daily schedules to a specific itinerary. Every cruise I've done the solo meet-up has been sometime between 5 and 6pm regardless of port schedules. For my med cruise I went with a regular inside cabin as I was booking last minute and it was dirt cheap so I never went near the studio lounge. I was on Epic a few months later in a Studio and the meetups were back to normal by then but that was Southern Caribbean itinerary so it was relatively short times at port.

Yep book for 2, the only restaurant where it's useful to the staff to know you're solo is Teppanyaki in case there's an odd-numbered group that you can even out. But you can tell them that on embarkation day or anytime before your reservation. There'll probably be other solos looking for dining companions anyway so its worth asking at the meet-up.

I did the med on Epic just after the resumption from covid so there weren't any hosted solos gatherings. The ship was very lightly populated for that one only 1200 to 1500 guests aboard depending on which staff member you asked. If you do excursions you'll meet people on those, I met another 2 solos on 2 of my excursions simply because we'd to share a row on the buses. Join the roll call for the cruise you pick and you'll get to know some people before you even board the ship. I would say that Breakaway has the studio cabins so there will definitely be other solos aboard and if you're in a studio you'll run into others in the Studio lounge at random times. The ports of call are long days on the Mediterranean itineraries, I did a lot of walking on my excursions so I spent a fair bit of time in the thermal suite recovering from that. I didn't miss the solo meetups but then I was on that trip after a summer of 6-day weeks in a very busy retail store so I wasn't feeling particularly sociable.

Thank you for sharing your experience!

Easy knowing you’re from the sunny south east! It’s cold enough on the west coast for me that I don’t need to deliberately seek out sub zero drinking opportunities.

I’m hoping a few of the seasoned Seattle visitors/residents can suggest which tour of Pike Place market is worth the time and cost. I’ll have 2 full days in Seattle before my cruise in October so I suspect a full morning will be spent at PPM before heading over to Pioneer Square area, Smith Tower and the underground Seattle tour. There are a few tours of PPM I’m finding listed which include tastings at some of the food outlets, the Chefs tour is explicit about what the stops are but the early bird tasting tour doesn’t guarantee what any will be. Then there’s a couple of other walking tours that include stops at PPM as well as en route to the market.

This Irish woman is the opposite, I have avoid any vodka’s made from corn so I tend to avoid vodka entirely. I’ve developed a taste for the new fruity G&Ts which won’t be on the ship, NCL have not yet jumped on the wider gin & tonic menus that are all over Ireland these days. I even discovered the Kopparbeg version premixed with lemonade is eminently drinkable without ice. my next cruise is Alaska in October so I’m figuring out what will work without ice if possible.

I’ll second Wordpress as a user friendly back-end. You are probably better off with a setup that splits the photo hosting to separate the costs. Using a service like jalbum means it’s setup to host a lot of high quality images without paying an arm and a leg.

Price increases are all over the clothing industry for cotton products, the cheaper items having higher rises than the premium due to the difference in margins. I do the orders for my family shop and there have been numerous price increases that started in 2021. In 2021 it was shortage of shipping containers and capacity issues at factories due to social distancing, in 2022 shipping costs started to come back down but then Ukraine started and fuel prices pushed costs back up again. Those fuel costs hit everywhere along the supply chain from raw materials onwards for every step of production and distribution. Our own brand t-shirts are printed directly across the road by another local business and they’ve had a hard time just getting the blank t-shirts so we had a fairly eclectic collection of colours for the past 18 months. They’re just starting to be able to get our normal colours back in stock for printing.

Panama was listed as a potential embarkation port for some itineraries, I actually considered it at one point. However there was a major incident at the Panama City pier as a port of call a few months ago. The pier construction has been way behind schedule and should have had a sea bridge type connection to the ship but instead it was a gangway. Due to the large change in tide height during the time at port the gangway became very steep and collapsed with guests on it. Obviously the full details are not in public domain due to probable litigation between the port authorities, NCL and the injured guests.

I was going to use Italy tours back in 2020 when my cruise got cancelled by covid, and then when I cruised in October 2021 the Italian authorities wouldn’t allow guests off the ship unless it was a cruiseline excursion. Despite not having had the chance to use Italy tours my experience dealing with them and the cancellations was all good, they are super responsive and will give you a discount if you book multiple excursions with them .

If a particular excursion takes smaller groups it's usually explicitly mentioned in the description. When I did the western Mediterranean itinerary the Italian guides all used a walkie-talkie system so you didn't have to be right on top of your guide to hear what they were saying. I would suggest bringing your own wired ear bud to plug into the walkies as their single use one is not very comfortable, think airline ear phones without the foam! I prefer smaller groups but the setup in Italy actually worked quite well. I went to independent providers in Barcelona and Palma, Barcelona wasn't so good as there was a road race that day and the diversions were a mess for the driver. Palma was an e-bike tour and there were only 3 of us that showed up so it was very relaxed, we were even invited into the courtyard of a private building when we had stopped to look through the gates.The caretaker told us they were planning to open the place to the public in the future much to the delight of our guide.