marybeshaw

He really does hope yours does the same :) Today is our 39th Anniversary. Too bad I am sick but he is spoiling me!

 

 

Oh wait perfect day to book a cruise!!!!!! :)

So true! Get a good one!

Thanks for that very thorough answer! Gratuities are included with our promotional fare (three for free), and I will have no trouble spending that extra $100!

We are headed to Alaska in a week! Last week we changed one person’s excursion from a $200 excursion to a $100 excursion. We expected to be refunded the money, but apparently it went into our OBC instead. Maybe because we paid for part of the excursions with OBC?

So my question is: is this returned $100 OBC refundable, or should we spend it all on the cruise ship?

Thanks in advance.

Mary

Yes, hot chocolate is available in the International Cafe (also in the buffet on some ships, i.e. Regal/Royal).

I don't know the cost for hot chocolate or the cost to add booze to it.

We always have a coffee card which includes hot chocolate (unlimited for the cruise). The card costs approx. $33 and gives you 15 punches for specialty coffees and teas plus unlimited "plain" brewed coffee, tea and hot chocolate. The unlimited goes away when the cruise ends. Lots of recent threads about the changes to the coffee card.

My guess is just hot chocolate (without a card) would cost $2 plus maybe another $2 or $3 for the booze. But whip cream is included free. ;)

After I posted I saw voljeep's answer, so my guess wasn't too far off.

Hot chocolate is also available with the soda and more package, right?

Not sure about the spiked version... maybe it comes with the PBP.

You will be fine and have a blast cruise number 30 coming up have not fallen or been murdered yet! Although hubby is looking at me funny! ..lol

Oh, I hope so! I am sure your hubby will take good care of you! Mine takes good care of me.

This is why I resisted cruising for so long. I watched a documentary about people disappearing from cruise ships with no recourse. Then that murder happened in Alaska and the FBI got involved so I thought it would be safer. And I didn’t want to limit myself from a possibly good experience. So we booked a cruise. We leave next week. I fully expect to come back.

Here are two photos I took with my iPhone 8 plus today at lunch, using the portrait feature. I downsized them in Lightroom on my laptop (couldn't figure out how to do it on my phone), but I didn't do anything else to them.

I will bring my Nikon D90 on my Alaskan cruise, but I'm fine with the iPhone for dinner photos and other times when I don't have my big camera on me.

I have an iPhone 8 Plus and that, as well as the iPhone X, comes with two cameras forward (and one selfie camera). The two cameras have different focal lengths, so you don’t have to use optical zoom quite as much. It also has a “portrait” feature that is actually a combination of two photos to get a depth-of-field effect.

It is a much bigger phone than the iPhone 8, but when I saw its camera I had to get the plus. I enjoy taking food photos at restaurants and putting them on yelp. I will try to attach a food photo I took with the portrait feature soon. I can’t attach it straight from my phone because it is too large.

Fairfield Nana' date=' I'm glad to hear of another happy Sony mirrorless owner!

Well, so I went around 1K over my original budget of $500, and ended up ordering the a6500 with a 18-185mm lens, plus a wide angle 12 lens. Once I saw the images from these camera types, I couldn't resist. I'm hoping it lasts a looong time for that amount! I have a LOT of homework to do in the next 5 weeks to learn this thing!

Happy picture-snapping and cruising, all, and many thanks again for your advice! :)[/quote']

 

Wow, congrats! Enjoy!

 

I decided to take my own advice and have been watching Lynda.com photography lessons to brush up- and I am so glad I did! I am learning a ton. There is a mirrorless camera course on there, as well as other courses that work for all cameras (like “composition” and “exposure”).

 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: my library offers free Lynda.com access, so check with yours. And if you bought your camera at a local shop, they probably offer classes, too.

With regards to paying for excursions with multiple payment forms... if you call customer service and choose the option for help with cruise personalizer, you can use partial OBC, partial credit card, and even partial gift card.

We put our excursions in our online carts before calling, and the friendly customer service rep could see them. She helped us “check out” using a combination of all three payment types (Alaska excursions are expensive!).

Good luck with your purchase!

I was originally taught to reformat my SD cards every time I downloaded pictures to my other drives, but I have started keeping all photos on my SD cards as additional backups, rather than reusing the same SD card.

I would recommend you find some classes to learn to use your camera, and also get some good photo software. Post-processing can make a night and day difference. I used to work for Adobe, and I am addicted to Creative Cloud (ask about an “employee” price if you know an employee). I also have almost always had access to Lynda.com through my employers, which has amazing online photography and post-processing (software) classes.

———

When I bought my camera, 5 or 6 years ago, I got the best body I could afford with a 50mm lens (no zoom; the cheapest lens I could find, but good quality!). I figured I would get a better lens in a year or so (which didn’t happen). I found it was tough to deal with family photos and such because I couldn’t zoom out.

Finally, for our Alaska cruise (in 3 weeks now!), we bought a “new” lens - actually a refurbished 55-300 lens - and a nice sling camera bag. That was my Christmas present!

So I will be able to zoom in, but not zoom out. For family photos, I will still have to back up a ways. Maybe in a year or two I will be add another lens to my collection.

The camera body has come a long way since I bought mine. I figured it would be a decades-long investment, and now I look at the amazing new cameras on the market and almost wish I didn’t go that route. But I have a body that will take 11x17” photos without blowing it up, and I enjoy shooting in RAW and doing the post-processing myself. I might not have the best new tech, but I do have a solid camera. That said, if I were to make the decision again, I am not sure if I would do the same thing.

Hello. I need a suggestion for a hotel near the Norwegian pier. But I need a hotel that would let me stay pre-cruise and then store my luggage for 6-7 hours post cruise as we have a very late flight home. I tried Marriott Waterfront and they do not store luggage. Edgewater Hotel is sold out. Probably $300-$350 price range. Thanks!

There is a way to send your luggage directly from the ship to the airport for free! Norwegian is a participating cruise line; not sure about your airline. It would save you the hassle of dealing with luggage post-cruise. https://www.visitseattle.org/things-to-do/cruise-information/port-valet/

I know your saying the Amex points can be used to buy the Carnival Gift Cards.

But also, the flipside: Amex card can be used to BUY the Carnival gift cards on Ebay ($100 Gift Card = Cost $85). AND EARN Amex points with the purchases. That would be good savings.

Haha, yes! And if it is a new card with a signup bonus, you could do pretty well!

Just throwing another way to get gift cards out: If you have an American Express card with membership rewards, you can use points to get Carnival Corporation gift cards. Those work on any Carnival line, including Princess.

They work great if you use them to pay for things over the phone, though Princess support reps sometimes need to ask for help in figuring out how to put them in the system.

Chase rewards only have carnival cruise lines gift cards, which cannot be redeemed on Princess. It is important to get the carnival corporation cards for Princess.

Could a camera with a good zoom lens double as binoculars?

That looks awesome!

Question: what do you do if you don’t drink wine? Give it to your server?

talk to me about programing in cobol and fortran using punch cards...;p

 

yeah, i'm old(er)

That is so awesome! My dad did that in his school days. He isn’t even retired yet, so it isn’t that much older. He always says, if he weren’t already a senior at the time (and married with kids), he would have changed majors to CS. He eventually had two kids go through the Computer Science BS program. Me in the nineties, and my little brother more recently.

I cut my teeth on page layout on a timeshare system in 1981 with an electrostatic printer. Don't remember the actual program, but it did TWO COLUMNS!

 

then it was some kind of word processing software on a stand alone machine the admin used and had 8" floppy disks. Then we graduated to personal/desktop word processing on Atari 128XLs, IBM 8086 to 80286 processors using early Wordperfect, then to Apple Macs/Lisas and Apple Write, back to the dark side of IBM and MS Word (in less than 5MB chunks) to Framemaker and then when Word grew up about 10 years ago we did heavy duty document layout on Word from then on...

 

You cannot begin to appreciate today's software and hardware without experiencing swapping 82kB 5 1/4" floppies when you print out your technical report from the word processor in order to manually insert IBM selectric equations printed on white stickyback correction tape...only to find out one entire paragraph is missing from the 3rd page...and having to start all over again!

Wow, I bet that was quite the chore! I actually had email at that first internship, and in the CS department at school. So it wasn’t quite that bad!

That is awesome. Not everyone realizes how powerful MS Word can be. I had an internship way back in college, programming Word and Excel to automatically produce scientific documents. There is some awesome power in there.

And you put it to good use on that travelog! I have only read through about a third of it so far, but I love your writing style and the way you portray the places you went and the people you met.

Very nice travelog! I am inspired to do something similar on my 7-day cruise! What did you use to make it, before turning it into a PDF and uploading it to OneDrive?

I love those transderm-scop patches. My first cruise is coming up, and I am planning to be over-prepared.

Amazon sells something my friend told me about: relief band. It helped her on her cruise. It sends electrical impulses into your wrist, and has five strength settings, so you can dial it up and down as needed. So it is more... active? ... than sea bands.

https://www.amazon.com/ReliefBand-Motion-Sickness-Device-Batteries/dp/B00VU8XXBE

So I will have the transderm-scop patches, ginger pills (amazon again), bonine, and the relief band.

(I got carsick in the passenger seat of my own car last week, but I keep telling myself it was because I wasn’t prepared).

I learned on my roll call there is a free secure luggage transfer from the Seattle cruise terminal to the airport when you go home. They attach your luggage tags the night before, when you put out your luggage, and you can spend any extra time touring Seattle rather than babysitting luggage. It is called port valet. It seems like a great thing, and since our after-cruise flight leaves around 3pm, we might do that.

https://www.portseattle.org/page/port-valet-enjoy-seattle-luggage-free

Hi everyone, just realized that the cruise we are taking on Oct. 5th leaves out of a Canadian port and the last time we left out of a foreign port was before we had to take any medication. When I tried to look up how to bring the meds all it said was original bottles. I get my meds in 6 month quantities at a time. If I bring those bottles I will need a separate carry on just for those. lol. Any suggestions? We board the ship in Quebec City. We fly out of Detroit, which I know isn't a problem. Since I have a Dr's appoint in Aug. and then he leaves I would like some ideas. Thanks.

I would suggest checking with your pharmacy. If you ask, they might provide you with small, printed, labeled bottles for you to take the medicine in.

I heard there are comment cards, and if you give someone a glowing review in a comment card, that goes a long way. They can get recognition and possibly even something monetary from their managers. Tipping extra $$ is great, but IMHO it would be quite thoughtful to go the comment route too.

I would be willing to bet Princess sells a lot more water than usual over the next few days.