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Do they charge state taxes on drinks when docked in Boston? If so that obc will probably just about cover those charges… maybe..

I believe I saw a recommendation to meet your Uber/lyft on Elliott ave which can be reached using a foot bridge from near the pier.

Even TAs dealing with corporate travel don’t keep up with visa requirements or health requirements, there are dedicated companies that they will reference for you to check with yourself. NCL even has a link to one such on one of their website pages. NCL can’t assume that everyone that books with them is as USA citizen or resident, yes the majority of their guests are but there’s plenty of others from elsewhere. The link they (NCL) sent out for Canada’s visa requirements site is one of the first such sites I’ve seen that actually gives an option to specify arriving by sea rather than air as their (Canada’s) requirements change in that scenario. It’s up to the traveller to check the entry requirements for the countries they’ll be visiting and to check health guidance. Vaccines have been a requirement or recommendation for many countries, e.g. if going to Australia for an extended time you have to provide a chest x-ray or proof of TB vaccine but that isn’t a requirement for a general leisure visitor.

Check if there’s a leaflet in your cabin before ordering it at a bar and wait until they’ve stopped charging local taxes to avoid even more cost. if you upgrade to FAS+ or premium+ beverage package you will be able to get bottles/cartons at any bar the same as any other drink.

The north Atlantic has been unusually warm this year, nothing like as warm as the Caribbean but definitely warmer than normal for us. It hit 19C in Ireland at the weekend (66F) normal peak is 16C. That may cause the storms not to weaken as much as they normally do but still shouldn't be anything like what hits the Caribbean or southern USA.

The value of the thermal suite to me varies depending on the itinerary. I used it every evening on a western Mediterranean cruise because there was so much walking on the excursions I did. I have it booked again for an Alaskan cruise next month because we've a lot of time at sea and it's unlikely to be the weather for the pool deck. I don't think I'd bother on a Caribbean cruise as I usually have a couple of beach/water based excursions on those itineraries. BTW the price also varies per cruise even if it's the same duration and ship. $350ish seems to be the current upper limit on a 7 day. I suspect cooler temperature itineraries and more time at sea would push up demand and therefore the price.

That would have been interesting! There is a fair bit of cross-over between rugby and Gaelic football in Ireland, it’s the reason more Irish rugby players are capable of kicking the ball and catching in the air rather than just the specialists within the team. You can even spot that a player had a Gaelic football background based on their kicking technique. The women’s rugby development officers here did a lot of recruiting in Gaelic football as they tried to grow the player base. There’s been a couple of occasions when the women’s sport supporters here were able to slag off the men when the women’s rugby team won tournaments or had significant wins while the men were rubbish or when the women’s boxers did better than the men. Most recently the women’s soccer team qualified for the World Cup while the men’s team can’t seem to buy a win at the moment. you may want to look into tag rugby.. it’s non contact mixed teams where the women’s tries are worth more than the men’s. Despite it being non-contact it was the sport that put me in cast and caused certain employers to refuse to allow their staff to finish early on league nights. Lots of finger injuries.

I’m not a meteorologist but I have spent 30+ years looking at weather charts for predicting surf. the main site I’ve used is the US naval oceanographic and meteorological service the link is for the North Atlantic chart for swell (waves) and wind. It looks like it’ll be Thursday before New England will start feeling any effect and could still be even later in the week before it kicks in. The picture below is the chart for Friday 6am, you can see the red colours which would be the central area of the storms with the biggest waves … surfers get very excited if it goes to black. the little L shapes show the direction of the wind and the number of lines on them show the strength of that wind L = 10knots, F = 20knts (shorter lines mean 5 knots) .

If you have underlying conditions you should be talking to a doctor if you catch covid. I caught it from a colleague last October and my doctor just prescribed steroid tablets in addition to stepping up my usual asthma regimen. I was fully vaxxed and had 1 booster done, I was offered my second booster a week after I had the virus but put it off until this summer so I’d be covered for a family wedding, family reunion and my next cruise (July, September, October respectively). I couldn’t have gotten the booster immediately after having the virus anyhow, the guideline here is to wait 6 months before getting a booster. I will say that I had a bout of bronchitis for the first time in years in between having had covid and getting the next booster so I suspect covid did leave me more susceptible to other respiratory illnesses in the short term.

It’s hit & miss for European customers, I managed to get my deposit transferred to a different cruise pre covid. I don’t know what they’d do if you’re rebooking to the same cruise, I suspect it will depend on the agent you are dealing with. in terms of getting back a cruise next certificate, that may very well depend on the original terms associated with the certificate you used. e.g. I booked a 2023 cruise for a friend with a cert of mine that was due to expire December 31, 2022 but could be used for sailing through 2023. If I was to cancel that booking I’d lose that certificate entirely as it would no longer be valid. That one is a bit of an odd example because it was a certificate purchased pre-covid which had it’s validity extended as a result of the shutdowns.

The charges from the ship don’t hit your card per transaction either, it all lands as a single transaction at the end of the cruise. You may see pre-authorisation showing up at the start but it’s not actually processed until the cruise ends. … or at least that’s what’s happened for me.

I’m still confused here… on all the ships except Prima there was always a set selection on the MDR menus with a rotating list of daily specials, usually the right hand page of the dinner menus. The order of the rotation could change from cruise to cruise. the dinner menu setup trialled on Prima had to make things more complicated in the galley as guests could pick pasta A with sauce X, or some other preferred combo which would have reduced their ability to have a bunch of dishes ready to just hand over to the servers. When they know exactly what dishes they’ll be serving they can have a certain number of servings ready to go before guests even arrive in the MDR. My understanding was that the Prima menu would only have a single special from specialty dining each evening, I can’t remember off hand if that menu item had an upcharge or not.

They have a few slots for flights to London Heathrow and they had a pair of daily flights out of Shannon to Heathrow that were always full but some genius decided to switch them from Shannon to Belfast which caused major issues for everyone that worked for multi-national companies in Shannon and the surrounding area. I was working for one such company when it happened and we all wound up having to drive to Dublin to get flights to North America, continental Europe and Asia. They since moved the slots back to Shannon because there just wasn't sufficient demand out of Belfast. But by the time they moved the link back to Shannon they had annoyed everyone so much that all the business customers now try to avoid them where possible so for European trips so they never returned to full planes all the time. The really annoying part was it was during the banking collapse so the Irish government actually bought a stake in the airline to help keep them afloat and the politicians ok'd the move to Belfast despite it not being in their jurisdiction. At the time their spokesman on transport was actually from the area hat includes Shannon so he gets ripped to shreds whenever he comes canvassing for re-election by those of us who aren't loyal to his party.

Aer Lingus are running a North American promo at the moment which they seem to do every few months. Personally I’m not a fan of Aer Lingus simply because they tried to sink my local airport, I will avoid them whenever it’s economically viable and I don’t have a connection within the US. I am using them for my next cruise as they were the best option to get to Seattle and they had an option that kept me from having to go via Dublin though I am going via Boston to Seattle rather than direct to Seattle.

Did you use the teleconverters in the end? I tried one years back before I got my 100-400mm lens and found it just slowed the focusing and made it very hard to get in focus action shots.

Here’s a few more terms… loo, jacks, the bog … depending on the bar in Ireland you may find a colloquial name on the door rather than something universally known. But generally most places use Toilets on the signs pointing to them if it’s not just a picture.

Try under the bed…. On my first cruise I never found them but discovered them in a basket under the bed when I was stashing my suitcase on my next one. It didn’t help that the steward tended to put the throw pillows into the basket on top of the life jacket.

Oh boy… this brings back memories of one of my customers getting one particular e-mail from me every hour for about 2 days straight because one of the mail servers had gone down while it was transiting through so when the server came back up it kept sending that one e-mail over and over again. Our IT guys had some fun tracking that down .. I was based in an Ireland office my customer was in Germany but everything got routed through a couple of servers in the USA on the west coast so the time zone difference did not help matters in getting it resolved.

I have to wear full covering in the sea due to an allergy to Jellyfish that is building towards anaphylaxis and 2 of my aunts have had skin cancer so I know all about keeping covered up. The first time I wore a rash vest to a water park in Majorca 20 years ago I had an argument with one of the lifeguards who worried it would get caught in their machinery but once I told him I wasn’t doing any of the slides and it was tight fitting just like a swimsuit he let me keep it on. long sleeve swimsuits are seriously in fashion right now and surf/sup leggings are growing in popularity even in Ireland. I used a long sleeve rash vest and leggings on my last cruise but am now switching to a long-sleeve swimsuit and leggings so I don’t have to worry about the top coming loose in the water. you are not going to have issues in the pools and hot tubs on the ship, there’s enough ladies wearing the swimsuits with a miniskirt type overlay and the men in boardshorts that loose fabrics are not a concern unless you go for the slides.

Now imagine an Irish person arranging a business trip from Ireland to the US and an American Express travel agent in the UK saying London to Phoenix.. I’m left saying “and how do I get to London? “ this while I was working in an office within spitting distance of Shannon Airport which has US preclearance. I remember that walkway… I went through it in 1994 and it looks the exact same!! you have my sympathies for the travel travails… I’ve traveled to the USA from Ireland over 20 times on a mix of work and leisure and have had a variety of “fun” experiences.

stick to the train then, it's basically right beside the drop off from the tender or metres from the pier if you dock. You can order a visitor leap card which will cover all the public transport in the city. If you are there on a Sunday the train won't be running until 9am but Dun Laoighre itself is a nice village to wander for a couple of hours.

Looks like midges, they love damp conditions without any wind. They can be immune to most chemical insect repellents. Generally they don't cause much irritation unless you get a heap of bites or you're allergic. There was a girl at camp with me one year that got her face destroyed by them and had an allergic reaction due to the quantity of bites.

Check on the schedule for Cork as you may dock in Cobh or in the commercial dock at the city. Cobh suffers a major bottleneck with the tour buses when a large ship comes in and only has pier capacity for a single ship at a time, if there’s a second ship one of them will be docked in the commercial port. Cobh was the last stop for the Titantic before the iceberg so there is a small museum there in addition to the big one in Belfast where she was built. If you are planning to do the Jameson distillery in Middleton or Blarney Castle then you may be as well off taking the ship excursion unless you’re travelling with a few others and could make a private minibus financially viable. be warned that the ring of Kerry, Killarney, Dingle or the cliffs of moher will means hours in the bus so try to stick to things within county cork if you don’t want to be spending 3+ hours in buses.

Which port in Dublin? Dun Laoighre or the city docks? if it’s DL there’s the dart train that will bring you into the city far more cheaply and quickly, if it’s the city port it shouldn’t cost much at all and the driver will probably try to get you to pay cash (euros) even though they’re supposed to accept cards.

Note to self… pack masks 😷