MalbecWine

Beautiful photos and would love to adopt that cute puppy.  Keep enjoying and thank you for sharing.

Has anybody been in suite 878?  We are booked from Barcelona to Miami...if so what did you think of the MS.

7 hours ago, WesW said:

Thank you for you very kind words fizzy, will be sure Rich, Barbara, Jim and Margaret hear your enjoying our Grand Voyage thread.  We will enjoy lunch today with Rich and Barbara before Ida and Barbara go to June Teruya’s how to make Polynesian bracelets out of Kukui nuts, coconuts, seashells and bracelets.

 

thanks too Boblerm/Bob & Jeanie for your hearts, thumbs up and smiles—we are loving Kasie and Boogie and their wonderfully upbeat (dance friendly) music.

 

If y’all r wondering why Ida and I generally, normally, usually have our thumbs up in our photos, for us, it is our way of sharing with our friends, cruise critic friends, and our family that we are loving life—everything is OK— at the photo moment.

 

Time for another Regent Mariner crew member profile:

 

Have you ever wondered who produces the daily flyer/cruise newsletter, “Passages,” on Regent Seven Seas Cruises.  Well, let’s meet the Mariner Crew member who is responsible for publishing the Passages.

 

Now, it is time for another Regent Seven Seas Mariner Crew Member profile.  These crew members work behind the scenes, normally below decks or out of sight of the Regent guests.  Yet, these crew are pivotal to all Regent guests enjoying their voyage.

 

Please meet the Mariner Desktop Publisher, Patrick Kiritescu, who calls Romania home.  He was originally from Transylvania.  Patrick is single and hoping to find the love of his life.  

 

Patrick is on his first contract with Regent, that began in July on the Voyager. 

HIs favorite Regent ship, is the one he is currently working on.

Prior to his Regent contract, he worked for another major cruise line for five years.  

 

On Oct 10th, in Miami, Patrick was transferred from the Voyager to the Mariner.

When he finishes this first contract, he will return to Romania where he will continue building his summer house on land belonging to his great grandfather.

 

Prior to starting work with Regent, Patrick worked the previous five years for another major cruise line as Desktop publisher.  Then, Patrick led/managed a team of eight crew members.  On his former cruise line his team under his leadership published daily cruise flyers in seven languages.

 

Now, on the Mariner as Desktop Publisher, he publishes the Mariner Passages himself in only one language.

 

Patricks main responsibility as Desktop Publisher for Mariner is printing all flyers/newsletters for Guests, and Crew.  For example, he publishes all menus (about 700 daily) and special flyers for entertainment, and transition day (Welcome aboard, Farewell, and In Transit) passages.

 

He tells me his most challenging duty is on transition duty. On the day before he easily spends about 11 hours producing the end of cruise comments flyer, all destinations excursion flyers, and multiple Passage editions (Welcome, Farewell, In Transit).

 

When asked what he liked best about working on Regent.  Patrick told me emphatically, that all departments on the Mariner work like clockwork.  Further, he lets me know, on Regent unlike the other major cruise line he worked on for five years, everything is organized.  Moreover, on Regent the crew really welcomes you and makes you feel like family. 

 

Patrick, importantly points out that for crew, being treated like family is very important for the new crew on board, as they are separated from their home family for six to eight months.

 

So, next time you peruse your dinner menu or read the daily Passages, please remember that Patrick, our Mariner desktop publisher, and  a mighty Team of only One publishes each Passage and menu.

Wes, thank your for taking the time to take us behind the scenes and sharing about the crew and some people will never interact with.  You have such a great style of presentation.

looking forward to our Explorer cruise next year 24 days starting in Barcelona.

Ida and yourself always look great in your photos.

I think the Irish call it both Shepherds Pie or Cottage Pie.  In Ireland all the pubs have it when we were there on a land trip.  No matter what it is good comfort food.  We have never had it in the UK.  Fish and chips with malt vinegar and Bangor’s and Mash..yes.

On 11/1/2018 at 1:54 PM, Wendy The Wanderer said:

That Shepherd's pie looked good, even if it's not really French Canadian, lol.  Tortière would be more authentic, but I'm sure it was yummy!

Shepherds pie is really Irish not Canadian.  Sometimes it’s called Cottage pie.  The Canadians have their own rendition of this but from the photo it still looked delicious.

I was speaking of inbound connections in the US from international.  Sorry, I thought I made that quite clear.  

Thanks Wes and Rich this is the best thread I have read in a long time.  The photos are great and the articulations of your comments.

I know Spam is popular in the Hawaiian Islands but not for me. 

Thanks again for taking us along and continue to enjoy.  Eleven months before we board the Explorer.  We are taking a break from cruising and doing some land trips for a change.

Again, if checking luggage to the US all bags must be claimed and go through immigration and customs.  Even on the same airline they must be claimed and rechecked.  You can get a porter to assist you.  Once you go through immigration then you get your bags and go through customs.  Easy.

Depending on what airport you are coming into and once you clear customs and immigration, you will go to the airline transfer desk of your connecting airline which is usually outside of custom.  It’s pretty easy.  No airline can check your bags from an international to your final destination in the US.

Wes, Ida and you look great in anything you wear land or onboard from your photos.  Thanks for taking us along and continue to enjoy.  The Big Island and Maui are two of our favorites.

24 minutes ago, GOARMY said:

Just feel fortunate to have the resources and health to participate! 

This is the best sentence I have seen and so true.

Wes, I am enjoying your interviews with the crew.  A happy crew makes for happy guests.

The Blue lighting does not give a few photos justice in CR.  Continue to enjoy and thanks for sharing your cruise with all of us.

Linda, we love table games as well.  Black Jack which we are both trained in is our game and we do well.  Cruise lines don’t care if you count cards in BJ but you have a little advantage over the dealer.  If you leave the table at the end of the night you will have met some nice people even if you came out with even money.  It’s knowing when to get up and call it a night.  We know very little about poker or craps so we stick with what we know and have been playing for thirty years including tournaments in Las Vegas.  

I am leaving for a tournament in Vegas to a tournament at the Wynn Encore tomorrow.  Some of the proceeds will go to the American Cancer Society as this is breast cancer month so we will all be wearing pink.

Thank you for the answer.  We will just have our TA give them more credit for the casino as long as it is refundable which she will charge on the credit card.

We wish it were like Crystal where you can get a line of credit in advance with an application but oh well it is what it is.  $400.00 is not sufficient for our gambling.

Speaking of the Casino can one apply for a line of credit?  I know Crystal does and other lines.  I play a lot of BJ and don’t want to carry a lot of money with me so a credit line would be safer.

11 hours ago, boblerm said:

Now  the dust is staring to settle and we are getting more used to the new and improved/degraded site, as the case may be, or as WesW refers to it, CC 2.0.  Some of the initial bugs are slowly but surely being worked out.

 As I peruse the various boards on the CC forum, it seems that one of the greatest source of consternation is the inability to use the CC and Tapatalk apps.  I, too, was quite perturbed when learning that this feature would no longer be available.  However, now a few days out, after playing around on the Test forum using the mobile CC site on my phone, my humble opinion is that this means of access to CC boards offers in many ways a far superior experience over that using Tapatalk.  I mentioned this to Wes, and he suggested that I begin a new thread sharing what I have learned so far, and others can chime in with their thoughts.  As this is quite new to all of this, what follows is clearly a work in progress.

 

First and foremost- in order to match the convenience of using an app, it is essential to create a shortcut to the Home Screen/ Desktop of your device.  For those that do not know how to do that, here are the instrucions:

Android (using Google Chrome)-

Open your browser, and go to https://boards.cruisecritic.com/

Tap on the 3 dots on the upper right, and choose "Add to Home Screen".  A shortcut will appear that allows immediate access to the CC Boards.

IOS (using Safari)-

Go to the Boards site in the browser as above, tap on the box with the arrow pointing up and choose "Add to Home Screen".

Now with one tap, the boards can be accessed, just like using the app.

 

Here are some of the advantages to using the mobile site that I think are improvements over using Tapatalk.  Note- I was using Tapatalk via my Android phone, and some of the things I mention here may or may not apply to the ios version, which I was not quite as familiar with.

 

1) You can now format posts, (bold, italics, underline, but not text size, however).  If you wished to do that using the app, you needed to use BBCode, which if you have never used, trust me, you don't want to.

 

2) When you compose a post, it appears in "what you see is what you get" form, much easier to visuaize what the actual post will look like once submitted.  This is especially true when including images, with the app, you could only see little thumbnails.  This way, one is far less likely to post the wrong image, or duplicate images, I have done this more than once.  It will also eliminate that problem of occasionally images appearing upside down (no kidding, this has actually happened to me), or sideways.  Which leads me to...

 

3) You can now edit posts from your device after submitted.  I was not able to do this with my Android app.  Previously, if I noted a glaring error after posting from the app, I had to get out my laptop, go to CC boards, navigate to my post, and edit it, within the dreaded 10 minute limit.  Now I can edit my post immediately from my device.

 

4) There is no longer a 6 image limit per post.  There is a 48.83 MB limit however, but on my last test post, I was able to load 8 images.  If your images are of lower resolution, you can put in more than that.

 

5) Mixing pictures with text was a major problem using the Android Tapatalk app, I don't think this was the case with ios app.  But on the Android app, once you inserted a photo in a post, the thumbnail would appear, and there was no obvious way of adding more text, you could only add more photos.  And the photos would appear one on top of the other, with no space between them.  There was a workaround- you had to tap the thumbnail and choose "insert in message" or some such, upon which the thumbnail would disappear, and be replaced with a string of gobbldygook  which was BBCode to a reference to the image on the Tapatalk site.  Now you could put in more text.  OK, that is probably way more information than you wanted.  But the point is, one had to be constantly aware of the position of the text you are typing in relation to all these strings of gobbldygook, or the captions would not match the picture.  It is embarrassing when you label a photo of your wife in Compass Rose as "Foie Gras Ravioli".

 

Here is the deal using the mobile site- open a message box and tap "click to choose files".  It is a simple matter to select the images you wish to post.  Once the images are up, you will notice a little + sign on the bottom left, tap it, and you can insert text, or a caption or whatever.

  I suggest after entering your text, hit the enter key a few times to create some space, lest the caption appear in the wrong spot.

 

6) It is a simple matter to embed a YouTube video in a post, here's how-

Go to the YouTube site, and on your video, click "share".  A box will come up showing the url, click copy.  Paste this link into a post, and voila, the video is embedded in the post.

Similarly, you can embed a photo from a 3rd party site such as Shutterfly.  In the message box, tap "insert other media"  Here you can paste a link to your photo that will be embedded in your post.

 

 

As for down side, there is only one that I am aware of at this point.  With the app, you were able to get notifications whenever someone posted on a thread that you have posted on, now it's not quite so easy.  In reality, for me, this was a mixed blessing, while it is nice to know  when there is activity in a thread that you are interested in, sometimes the frequent notifications can get a bit annoying.

I am aware of 2 possible solutions for those who wish to be kept up to date on thread activity.  When posting, you can click on the "notify me of replies" box.  Then you get emails of activity, and who needs more emails cluttering up your inbox.  Alternatively, you can create a shortcut on your Home Screen, instead of, or in addition to the one you created to access the boards with this address:

https://boards.cruisecritic.com/followed

 

Here you will see all of the threads that you have marked as "following".

 

 

I am in no way suggesting that the Cruise Critic gods maintain the policy of not supporting apps, I strongly feel that the more choices we have, the better, and I do hope that this policy is reversed.  In the meantime, I, for one, and ok with the new way, and I hope some info here is helpful to others.

Please feel free to correct any errors I may have made here, and I hope people will chime in with little gems that they pick up along the way, and I also hope to hear from those that disagree with everything I have said.

 

Bob

 

Bob, your pictures on the Crystal board were stunning.  I would call you an artist of photography.

I agree with Forgap, you are an inspiration that keeps us all cruising.  Your photos are great as well as your blogs.  Any chance you will be on the Explorer next year from Barcelona to Miami?

Usually they keep the bottles close to the tables for re-pours and as was mentioned. The Sommelier upon request may leave the bottle at your table if it’s just for two.  Just ask if you are going to stick with the wine you tasted.  You will not be deprived.😁

The problem with the lotions and shampoos is that they tend to leak if you are flying home.  Pack a few zip lock bags even for your own personal items.  We had one suitcase disaster several years ago with leakage and ruined a couple of blouses.  We don’t bother taking toiletries off the ship anymore or leftover booze as it becomes too cumbersome and if you can afford a luxury cruise you can buy these items at home.  JMHO

We are on this cruise for the second time Feb 1st. It can be windy and quite chilly. Take the winter coat.

Absolutely agree, I have done three Antarctica cruises going through the Fjords and at least pack a puffer jacket. If you are going through the Cape it can be the Drake Lake or the Drake Shake. Weather changes rapidity at El Fin Del Mundo (the end of the world) Absolutely gorgeous.

Having seen that previous thread, I'll admit that that picture makes it seem as though everyone was quite bored. Not much of a celebration - just waiting for the inevitable.

 

Sent from my phone using Tapatalk

In my sick sense of humor we are all waiting for the inevitable.:eek: Enjoy while you can and embrace each day.

I don’t believe everything I read here as well. I have read many complaints about Regent and all of the luxury lines. People want to nit pick and make judgements all the time. Seabourn is an excellent line. We are not married to any luxury line although we have 35+ cruises on Crystal we are open to trying other lines as well. If you have not sailed them you really can’t pass judgment. We are doing the Explorer next year and we will make our own judgement, the good and the not so good from our experience..but hopefully all good. We shall see.

Sorry Texas and I went to TCU but Nashville is still the reigning city for country music. Love country anyway.

What Champaign do you get in the MS on the Explorer? What I have read it is mediocre Champagne. On Crystal you get Veuve Clicquot or Cristal and sometimes Dom Perignon. In the CP it is replaced as needed. When you pay for a high end suite it should be better than the bar pour.

A place to stay or visit is the Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay. Gorgeous property and not too far. We have stayed there three times and other places in the north of Bali. Here is a YouTube video of the property.