eileeshb

There are a few threads on that board specifically discussing kit for Alaska. Remember you can also rent camera kit online if you want something for a once off trip rather than investing thousands.

That was an English winger who couldn’t hack top level rugby either. Only the English considered him a high profile player and they’re very good at blowing their trumpets. I tracked all the injury enforced retirements in Irish rugby over the course of a couple of seasons years ago, and there was definite trend downward in age, we’re now seeing guys in their mid 20s retiring as a result of injuries incurred. Neck problems and leg/ foot injuries cause the majority of retirements but there’s also been a sprinkling of guys with concussion issues retiring too. There’s a growing number of teams using artificial pitches which is reducing the injuries in scrums but increasing the severity of leg injuries when they do occur.

One Irish player used his USA eligibility as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger contract when the rumour that Miami dolphins wanted to sign him as their kicker was floated.. the reality was that there was no way in hell he’d play a bit part in NFL when he the top dog in the reigning European champion rugby club even if he’d have gotten obscene amounts of money relative to rugby. The hits in rugby have gotten so severe that there’s now a serious move to tweak the laws to reduce the risk to players. Remember rugby only became a professional sport about 30 years ago so in some respects it’s still not particularly mature, but it is a few steps ahead of NFL with a growing population of pro female rugby clubs . I had a colleague in Intel who was a cheerleader for the NFL side in Phoenix and I was horrified to find out that they weren’t paid a dime, she was working full time at Intel to make a living while also training as a full time athlete for that NFL side unpaid. That was back in the early 00s so I don’t know if that has since changed. I will note that Gaelic games in Ireland are amateur so those players are all working full time in day jobs while also training to an elite level but they’re not playing against pros in other countries unless it’s the compromise rules matches against Australia whenever the sponsorship is available.

That looks like the sport 99% of the world calls football. But there are many sports that are called football … soccer = football to the vast majority of the world’s population Gaelic football = Irish version that shares a common ancestry with multiple other football variants caíd = precursor to Gaelic football, rugby, afl, nfl,… Aussie Rules football = Australian version of Gaelic football with enough commonalities that there are occasionally “compromise rules” games played between a national selection teams from Australia and Ireland. Rugby Union football = rugby Rugby League football = league flag football = weird American version of tag rugby NFL/ American football / gridiron = the unfittest football players in the world, supposedly professional elite players sucking down O2 from a tank after being on the pitch for 5 minutes and wearing more padding than every other version of football in the world. And only a single player in the entire squad ever actually puts boot to ball so really doesn’t justify the use of the term “foot”ball.

What exactly is in that? It looks like a baby Guinness (tia Maria or Kahlua with a bailey’s head).

One of P&O’s cruise ships broke it’s mooring lines in Mallorca during the week, highly unusual for wave action to be that strong in the Mediterranean. That ship hit a nearby freighter but it seems they just dented it. That wasn’t even close to hurricane strength conditions.

I did a school tour to France many years ago and none of the teachers with us spoke french so they relied on the eldest students to give the bus driver instructions. When we were in Paris one of our activities fell through so they asked the driver to bring us to some place with lots of lights ... we wound up in the red light district. One of our teachers stood up and said "obviously we can't let you off the bus here but I'll be back in a few minutes" ... there weren't any sex shops in our home area back then so he took the opportunity to get to one... I'll note I was in an all girls school we only had 2 male teachers and both were on the tour along with 2 of the female teachers. French was a mandatory subject for the students but the teachers that came with us were the Geography/History, Art, Irish and Business studies teachers. The teacher that ran off to the sex shop was the Geography & history teacher.

Does the train slow/stop at the main viewpoints highlighted in that map?

The most visible impact has been cabin stewards and entertainment, the stewards are now servicing about double the amount of cabins and the entertainment casts are being cut down as contracts come up for renewal.

I got covid last October and was offered my second booster just a week after so couldn’t get it then.. my brother got married in July so I decided to get the booster before that so it would cover me for my cruise in October. Thankfully I haven’t had too many coughing to sneezy customers despite the absolutely rubbish weather here this summer so I’m hoping I’ll avoid picking anything up.

I attended a couple of the mojo (mobile journalism) conferences held here in ireland when I was doing a journalism masters. They included a few photographers and videographers who had converted to smartphones almost entirely. I've used various phones as well as dSLRs and a mirrorless over the years and the only use case where the dSLR outperforms the rest is in the variety off lenses you can use , particularly telephoto lenses for sports or nature. However I just got the Samsun S23 ultra and tried it out this morning for the surf report pictures at work. The camera we usually use is a really old bridge camera that can't cope with mist at all, on my old phone I'd have set it to x3 zoom and the image would still be pretty grainy. This is the shot from a misty morning and low tide using the new phone x10 zoom, the waves were a good 500+m from me.. To be absolutely honest I could see the waves and surfers more clearly on phone screen than with my bare eye !

This is reassuring me about Prima.. my uncle and aunt want me to talk my mum into doing a transatlantic with them and Prima looks to have the best dates/route considering she has reached an age where she hates airports.

officially you can always use a single cruise next voucher, they call them deposits but never enforce that as the required deposit rarely matches the value of the CN. Also as a general rule you can always use 2 CNs on balcony or above cabins when booking 6months or more out. As others have mentioned there are regular promos to allow 2 CNs on any class of cabin or cruise date, and very very rarely there’s a triple promo. I’ve only seen the triple promo once and that was during the resumption after covid so it basically allowed people to use CNs that were about to expire. I have booked cruises when only a single CN was allowed but then used a second one as a part payment when the double up promo came along. ignore the OBC nonsense in the marketing bumpf , it’s a deliberately fake sales tactic as the OBC is the discount on the CN purchase. The CNs are valid for 4 years, they did extend a lot of them for a year or 2 due to the covid shutdowns and that saved mine from going entirely to waste, but I still wound up using one for a friend’s cruise booking as it was due to expire December 31st 2022. As it was one of the extended dates I could use it to book a cruise happening in 2023 so my friend is sailing to Alaska with me later this year as a result.

I’ve been looking into Holafly as they do an unlimited data package for USA, their FAQ lists AT&T as one of their carriers and when you look at the AT&T coverage map it should work, but when I did a chat session with Holafly their rep shared an internal map which shows zero coverage in Ketchikan.

Basically the letter just has a link to the Canadian immigration service to check if you need an eTA. Every country is different, if I was flying to Canada I’d need an eTA but just visiting on a port of call for a cruise I don’t. As I’m from Ireland I don’t need a visa to visit Canada anyway but folks from other countries may. The page the weblink goes to has a series of questions to determine if you will need an eTA, visa, both or neither. They know not everyone on the cruise is necessarily a US citizen so NCL have to send out the notice for that reason.

The number of meals and WiFi minutes under the basic Free At Sea have changed over time and vary by cabin class. When I made my booking(in January 2022) for my cruise this coming October the FAS package for a studio was 250mins WiFi, 2 dining credits and $50 per port excursion credit, by the time I booked a friend on the same cruise also in a studio it had changed to 150mins WiFi, 1 dining credit and $50 per excursion credit. Somehow when they did the changes I retroactively got the change in the excursion credit yet retained the 2nd dining credit and the extra WiFi time.

My understanding is as a solo you don’t need FAS+ to get a second excursion credit, you get the $50 per excursion on the regular FAS, I’d suggest capturing the same screenshot I posted which says it’s per tour not per port.

I’m looking at which eSIM to buy for my cruise to Alaska as I’m travelling from Ireland. Has anyone used the Holafly eSIM in Alaska? They’re the one company that seems to be offering unlimited data for their USA product. they claim the AT&T are one of their carriers in the USA but not just AT&T. I’ll be in Seattle for a couple of days precruise so I will definitely be using my phone for google map, uber, and streaming a couple of rugby matches . ketchikan is the one port I definitely want to have coverage as I’ll be trying to find the totem poles around the town.

I did western Mediterranean itinerary on Epic just after the resumption from covid in 2021, we lost Cannes as a port of call because Spanish covid regulations required all the Americans to have been covid tested before disembarking so it was a sea day which was spent getting everyone tested aboard. I managed to stream a rugby match on my iPad that day but the signal definitely varied around the ship, it wouldn’t stream in the atrium but did in my cabin and the ship was pretty sparsely populated on that sailing (1,200 to 1,500 guests max). I’d suggest checking on the shore excursion credit terms again, it was changed to a credit per excursion rather than per port but the text on the ncl website does have a tendency to contradict itself from time to time. I do know it applied to every excursion I booked for my next cruise even in the ports where I booked 2 excursions. I did the sorrento & pompeii excursion through NCL and there is a lot of walking in Pompeii, the visit to the crafters is 2 places, one woodcrafter place in Sorrento and a cameo maker at a jeweller beside the entrance to Pompeii. If you fancy limoncello the tourist shops in Sorrento are pretty free with giving samples, I was a wee bit buzzed getting back on the bus there. They even have a pistachio version and a few other flavours.

The NCL app is as unpredictable as their website, I had 2 cruises on epic in the space of a couple of months on one the app worked perfectly, no problem accessing the freestyle and restaurant menus, etc… a couple of months later without any change of phone on my part and it failed miserably no matter what I did (including re-install and power cycles).

They can't hole punch the NCL cards that are using wireless to open cabin doors, the antenna goes all around the card so there isn't a safe place to punch it.

Room key? As in ship cabin keycard?

I only looked at the menu after you posted this comment… I hate to say it but there’s plenty of places in Ireland with similar pricing at the moment. Poached eggs on avocado toast with salad in my favourite local cafe is about €12 I work in a seaside town and this summer has been atrociously quiet by our standards so we’re all having a row with the local council who want to increase parking charges, increase the areas liable for charges and increase the hours when they’d apply. This is a rural village with a relatively small permanent population where the primary businesses are tourism focused and either surf or golf being the main drivers in addition to our proximity to the 2nd most popular paid tourist attraction in the country but only a tiny fraction of the buses going there actually stop in the local villages en route.

Chances are the excursion list wouldn’t be complete this early unless it’s PoA whose itinerary rarely changes. From what I can figure most of the provider contracts seem to be renegotiated regularly and with the Caribbean ports there’s a chance of various providers getting wiped out by hurricanes. The company my parents used to get a charter yacht from in the BVIs still isn’t back to full capacity after Irma and Maria. One of the popular excursions in Alaska at Skagway (not the train) didn’t happen at all last year or this due to staff shortages. I’d say 12 months out from the start of the main season for the itinerary you’re looking for would be max list of excursions. I’m doing an Alaska cruise in less than 50 days and even at this late stage vibe passes are still available… but if it was a warmer weather itinerary that definitely wouldn’t be the case. I originally booked that cruise in January of 2022 to avoid the increased cost on the daily service charge and reductions in the FAS benefits, I then booked it for a friend in December of ‘22 and it cost about €300 less.. since then the price has bounced between those 2 figures.

Those sorts of forms aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on in Ireland, you can sign and still sue everyone. It’s only a matter of time until one of the local cliff walks here gets way more regulated, there’s at least one injury per month requiring the local rescue services. It’s so regular that the rescue crew got a custom made trolley that could handle the rough ground in the wet while hauling the latest idiot back to civilisation.