cardiffman

Let me offer my thoughts and see which ones you may agree with.

Veranda and balcony are pretty close to synonyms in their usage in descriptions of cruise ship cabin space. In the design of a house, I think of certain verandas as supported from below, while balconies are suspended or cantilevered. The examples of veranda I am thinking of occur mostly in the Southern USA. Also a veranda as part of a house is a space you can walk up onto from off the property, while a balcony is not generally reachable except from the rooms it is attached to. I once lived in a flat that had a small patio (the developers called it that anyway). For the exact same floor plan, one floor up, the developers and residents agreed the space above my patio off their flat was called a balcony. The one qualifying feature of those balconies was that they were suspended over each other and over patios like mine.

In light of the above, perhaps both terms don't apply well to something attached to a cruise ship cabin, except where they are clearly cantilevered. The balconies on Princess ships are cantilevered in the cases I've seen up close. Their weirdness is that the Sky Suite (oddly enough the most expensive cabin on the Sky Princess) has a "wrap around balcony" that could better be described, in land terms, as a terrace. 

This is Mike.

Kathy and I have a slightly easier schedule. We have a 2:30pm flight to catch, so we don't have to wake up that early. We do live about 100 miles from LAX so we can't sleep too late. We may get to use the AA lounge in LAX if rain and procedures don't eat up our morning. We'll land at 2:30am and it will be 7:30am ART. I've had jetlag before but this is a different level. It turns out if you're 22 and you fly LAX-CDG starting at 9pm, you land in the late afternoon, and you can just stay up and crash at about midnight, and that's cool. So in a way, the 5-hour time difference is less practical and I'm not 22 anymore. We'll probably need some sort of nap.

We have had a good time cruising. Part of that is because Abby and Glen have been with us on all but one of our cruises. We also have ended up having adventures in ports. For example there is no dock for water taxis at the Office in Cabo. And when someone turns up missing at 3AM, they wake the whole ship with announcements until the person turns up--Okay that wasn't in a port. It was the talk of the tenders though. Although one seldom goes far from port, the thing about cruising is you go someplace over a period of days and you have your own place for your stuff. We also have fun running lines from a certain movie when we board a ship. We're basically in a kind of honeymoon with cruising and we hardly think of destinations that don't have harbors, unless it's to visit family or friends. 

Traveling on a Celebrity ship for the first time will be a fun thing for us. It's clearly going to be different in lots of small ways. Celebrity seems to be encouraging the skippers to be out on social media so we've been following @captainkatemccu and @captainsympouras on Instagram. The latter is our skipper this cruise. 

See you on board and remember, every day that the funnel is above the keel is a good day.

These comments make me curious to experience it for myself. It will be a long while before I would end up on the Edge, though.

31 minutes ago, APDMOM said:

Captain Dimitrios:

 

 

I feel this is what Elton John would look like if he changed careers.

1 hour ago, BarbinMich said:

Am I the only person who goes to the X website and doesn't get the HTML version--I just see an outline version of the website?  FYI, the Princess website works fine.

 

Some websites separate their information from the looks and dynamics in separate files. The downside is that a technical issue can some of the files from loading but not the others. I believe you got the HTML but didn't get the rest. Depending on why that happened a refresh may improve things. 

I believe I asked this on another thread and don't recall getting an answer. Prior to CC the boarding priority for all those waiting in the terminal at the moment boarding commences:

 

1) Wedding parties and BVE's (plus aligned passengers)

2) Suites and Elites (supposedly in order of their arrival, but not sure if that organized).

3) Platinums in their order of arrival & check-in (for sure this way in Port Everglades where the earliest are eventually let upstairs to a second seating section from a downstairs holding area)

4) All other passengers by seating sections in the terminal that corresponds (or should) to order of check-in)

 

Once boarding is in process with the general passengers, those arriving later simply board as they complete the check-in process.

 

SO... the $64 question is where does Club Class Mini-Suite fit in? Obviously if you are Elite or Platinum, you have a home. Where do non-status passengers who have booked Club Class Mini go in the above order? I imagine it is either mixed in with the Platinums, or before or after them.

 

Inquiring minds would like to know. THANKS!!

My experience seems to indicate that the CC's board at the same time as regular suite occupants.

We have done 3 cruises in CC Mini's and all but one of our cruises were with friends so I don't remember the mechanics as much. So I can only go by one cruise out of LA. In LA when we got to a certain point in the process some nice person handed us a black piece of paper, it had I think "Priority" on it in white letters. And that prioritized us all the way to the gangway. We benefited logistically from the priority treatment on this particular occasion. But it won't always go that way.

Details:

Priority 'card' in hand, either we followed signs which would tend to say, "Platinum/Elite/Suite/CC" or similar, or we would be checked and I'd flash the piece of paper. This led to us waiting in the chairs assigned to all the priority people as opposed to the non-priority people. On this occasion we were in the "other" terminal (Pier 93, not sure) which has the ship parallel to the Vincent Thomas bridge, which felt older and smaller than the one which has the ship perpendicular to the said bridge. Since there were tons of priority people, the room with water and coffee was jammed with people. So the waiting room may have been smaller. I like to joke that they were standing on top of each other in that room while waving their black cruise cards. With our humble gold cards, we were thrilled to have a priority of any kind on our second cruise, and sat in the chairs. Eventually they dropped the barrier and basically the waiting room and the priority chair area both emptied at once into a nice stairway and basically mowed down the ill-advised photographer's station they put there at the bottom of the stairs.

I would say that the 45-minute wait did not make us feel specially treated or prioritized. It would have been better had more things happened to try and balance that out, such as laying on sufficient refreshments and making sure even the priority chair area had been served them.

BTTFY (But that's travel for you!)

WOAC (We're on a cruise!)

WiFi has a fee at many >300 per night hotels and has no fee at many "motels" so this is not something you can say is inevitably linked to how much you paid to be there.

Has Alaska Amber Ale always been available on Alaskan cruises? I tried it and liked it well enough.

Old sailing ship terms. The orlop deck is the lowest deck in the ship that's mainly for storage of lines and cables. The poop deck is above the stern cabin. You can see it especially in pictures from sailing ships of the 1700's and 1800's.

I was looking into the aft windows of the Westerdam and I thought I saw a public room with windows and tables at the lowest deck. I had not seen the Westerdam up close before. But I was certainly ignoring something, the thick ropes coming out below the windows. I was also ignoring the fact that the windows were not glazed. What I was looking at was the deck from which the aft mooring lines spooled. The tables were the spools and the room was surely not public.

I kept thinking how nice it was that the Westerdam had a restaurant or lounge in the stern so that everyone could look at the wake. Someone should build that.

Thank you for your report from Emerald north of 48º -- where satellite bandwidth costs 10x more. Apparently the

daily limits are solving peak load issues better than I would have expected. Good news!

 

Still won't do much if you're docked in the wrong spot at Juneau or Skagway and there's a mountain between

you and the satellite. :(

Yes indeed topography did cause trouble, no looking up Endicott Arm while in Endicott Arm. In Skagway we were docked right by the hill and LTE was available.

These are the PrincessCONNECT packages, faster internet, and yes they are the same as the Regal, Caribbean, Grand and soon the Emerald.

From what I understand the Platinum/Elite internet benefit will still be the by-the-minute packages, and there may be a possibility to change to an unlimited plan for a cost. I also understand that the unlimited internet that has been offered to platinum/elite passengers on some ships will soon be eliminated being replaced with the minute plans.

I'm on the Emerald right now using the Surf level. The cruise is a 7-day round trip from Seattle to Alaska. I'm not elite or platinum. Most of what I do is text and it has worked, but some sites are not working as well as others. But Facebook works, this site works, and GMail works, and almost all the news sites I've tried to visit from Google News links have worked. Even sites of competing cruise lines worked. Since Surf doesn't include streaming, even the thumbnail of a video linked from a web site will not appear. It is great to have only a daily MB limit instead of a total minutes limit.

I had had no idea that the packages would be different.

I think our Elite friends did get a different offer, which was the offer they were used to getting.

Some TA's suggest reading Cruise Critic. That's why I do. I still ask questions.

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Ouch! Glad you weren't hurt worse.

 

 

 

My so-glad-I-had-it "moment" with the AW100 came as follows. I'd bought it a little over five years ago to take on an expedition cruise to Antarctica. I was shooting then with a Nikon D7000, and had gone back and forth over whether to purchase a waterproof camera to also take along on the zodiac cruises and wet landings. I finally decided to buy one just before we left home, and I carried it with me in the pocket of my parka whenever we were on a zodiac or a landing.

 

 

 

At the end of one of the very wet landings, I was getting ready to walk into the water to board a zodiac to return to the ship and had just stashed my DSLR in my dry bag when the scene below suddenly unfolded. Thankfully, I was able to get that little AW100 quickly out of my pocket and capture the moment. It may not be the best image photographically, but it's one of my favorites from that trip, always makes me smile, and underscores the truth of "the best camera is the one you have with you."

 

 

 

 

 

 

(photo by turtles06)

Obviously an excellent example of "the one you have with you". The composition makes me wonder, are the penguins seeking passage?

Grand,

 

I much prefer my $10 Walmart shirt patterned in a very tasteful camo pattern. Fashioned and designed in a third world backwater and sewn and made by slaves and children. On formal nights I include my matching camo baseball cap ( worn backward to really impress others).

 

Always at the height of fashion and sure to garner many comments! It's my right to ignore any dress code and never be challenged.

 

Senior Geezer Plus

You forgot the safety orange trim worn at the best of weddings.

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I have a strong interest in Antarctica cruises and signed up to the Silversea mailing list for that reason. Some Silversea cruises would be less than I've paid for a cruise. On the other hand that intriguing Northeast Passage cruise would be a lot more. I did receive this survey.

The proposed cruise in my case was a 16-day cruise for $18,000 (destination I don't recall), which is outside the envelope I have in mind. I think Verandas on the current menu of "Antarctica" cruises (grand tour of some large portion of South America with an interval in Antarctic Peninsula) can be had for $13,000 so I was not impressed by the price point. Like one of you above I rejected both choices of each pair.

I don't know if I read the survey right; I thought it was suggesting that you'd have the base price or the higher price available to book at any given time, and asking which you would book.

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It's interesting that the Caribbean, Alaska, and Amazon have not appeared on this thread. Any votes for any of these?

I do recall seeing lots of warning signs in California - hotels warning you they use dangerous chemicals on the premises

Prop 65 warnings in California: If you were visiting a paint thinner plant in California there would be signs informing you of the vapors you would be inhaling and so on. It does go to the point of chemicals believed to cause cancer, such as the products of the Maillard reaction (which makes food brown and tasty when it is cooked). I have mixed feelings about it.

There is a doctrine in law, which my layman's understanding is that if you know that you are exposed to damage due to the actions of another party, you still have to prevent the damage as best you can. I can see a few arguments either way. Will they start water-cooling the pool deck someday? :)

I enjoyed these videos. You seemed to be having a good time, the ship is beautiful, and the video gives me a very good idea of what it's like to sail on the Muse. I recently saw a somewhat dryer video of Silver Explorer and another thing this video brings to light is that the Explorer is not as roomy as the Muse.

Either the guy with the camera is very practiced or one or two of those shots were done with a small drone.

Also, where is everybody? The ship seems not to have many people in the public rooms.

new final payment policy goes into effect aimed at encouraging guests to finalize their cruise bookings earlier and help reduce the likelihood of cruise cancellations.

My reading of this is, given that it is a quote from an email received by a TA, is the new policy is aimed at discouraging a TA's clients from cancelling their bookings. This is what "cruise cancellations" may refer to. The wording is also meant to appeal to TA's, not passengers. "Dear TA: We made this change so your commissions will be more predictable. You're welcome." Princess may also hope it reduces the churn of bookings dropped that have to be resold and resold as the departure date approaches.

Does that interpretation make sense?

On March 13 I received an email from "my personal consultant" at Silversea stating an opportunity for a cruise departing "Mar 13". I couldn't have made it to Vancouver in time to board, but I clicked through anyway. It was really "May 13".

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The Sky Lounge looks nicer than the Skywalker on Princess ships, because I like headroom (ironically, I'm 5'6" so I don't need it). In fact it seems like quite a few rooms/spaces are two-stories high. That picture of the main dining room is another nice example.

So true! LOL We are just so used to the near decadence of it all. As we were getting on an elevator on the final morning of our last cruise, a fellow passenger said, "Who is going to take care of us now?" My husband and I have laughed about that since that day. And sure enough, we are going back for more.

I know that feeling and I haven't been on Seabourn yet. After a 5-night cruise to Mexico, we eventually went to a Panera shop to have breakfast. I ordered brewed coffee, and they handed me an empty paper cup. I was so confused! Then I turned around, saw the coffee urns, and laughed at myself.

Nice picture first of all.

The four and five day cruises out of LA are really in my sweet spot and I'd hate to see any reduction in them.

The longest cruise I've done was 5 nights out of LA, to a relatively fair-weather destination (in theory if not in fact), and it really works well with my style of vacation to do such a short cruise. I can put everything in the larger carry-on and the suit for formal night can go in there if I unpack it right away. I don't say this from just the three cruises my sig documents, but also countless trips I've done by air.

Almost every non-cruiser I talk to is so concerned about motion sickness that other issues (which honestly they may not be eager to mention, such as cost) don't even come up. Could they advertise that they can keep you from getting sick?

The best I could capture... BUST!

 

I think this sunrise is beautiful. Here in Sunny California we only have sunsets over the water.