Mich3554

Another thing we discovered on our most recent cruise…….if we found the beef or lamb overcooked for us on one side, try the other.

Different strokes. I like it. It’s you.

We do this too. I just finished arrangements paying for our Northern Lights cruise in Jan. I was able to get business class air for about $700 pp less than Viking quoted (not counting the add on for Air + and deviation charges). Next up is Bangkok to Vancouver next spring. Some preliminary looking as shown we will be ditching airfare for this too.

DH tends to order beers at lunch, and he has gone through the beer list and has never been charged for the his beers. We never take the SS package.

We did Magdalena Penguin reserve. There is about a mile walk around the small island where there are tons of penguins and gulls nesting (this was in Dec). DH was ff taking pics with his Nikon (and much better lenses) in another direction when I tried to get his attention. A skua was attacking a gull nest and gulls AND penguins together fought off the skua. The skua hobbled away to his buddy skua on the side of the path to figure things out. By the time DH saw what was going on, he missed almost the interaction…..so no pics. We didn’t stay near enough t8me there. I could have gone around again.

There was a motorized scooter on the Iceland to NYC cruise I was on a few weeks ago, I know as he backed into me. It was like a miniaturized cart you can ride at the grocery store.

However, a medical policy is fairly reasonable to pick up compared to 10-15% of the cost of a trip. We bought medical insurance for a month in Fiji, it was a few hundred $$ (required for travel to Fiji). Medical insurance for the WC was 1/10 of what TripMate was.

Nope. DH prefers to self insure. I did some tooth gnashing about the World Cruise we recently completed, but we did wind up picking up medical insurance for the cruise from another source. Both of us are fairly young and healthy, but I suspect there will be a time where it becomes a more serious consideration.

Not instead….in addition to.

Not as good as it used to be. We added a cruise onto our WC while on board through the cruise consultant and the perks are not near what they were in 2021.

There are far more social activities on a world cruise, but TBH it doesn’t sound like you like sea days. There are a lot of sea days, I think the longest chunk of sea days we had was 6 sea days. Viking doesn’t have many social activities set up for the cruise we were on the last 2 weeks because I believe that there was only one scheduled sea day in that cruise. So it makes no sense to bring on a bridge instructor and the ilk for one sea day.

This being said, NY officials did not release the ship to disembark for nearly 75 minutes after we were scheduled to disembark, and once the ship was released, there were only 3 agents to process people in NYC, and 4 other agents just hanging around not processing passengers. This also happened at the beginning of the WC, when the port agents in FL would not allow boarding to start until long after boarding. I think that the ship was not released until 2 pm, when boarding was supposed to start at 11 am. Not only that, when we landed in LA to pick up passengers, EVERYONE had to disembark and we got to wait to talk to immigrations. Facial recognition software is minor when it takes US officials much longer than normal to release the ship. So this wasn’t Viking, but US immigration who mucked up your schedule. The 178 days we were on the Neptune for the World Cruise, going through face to face immigration in the US was the worst….even worse than Saudi.

I ate about 1/3 my meals from that back station on the WC. They had the best chicken noodle soup back there, and stir fries. Dim sum for breakfast…..miss it already!

I was told at the explorers desk it was one or the other. I believe one excursion was set up because of those who could not hike. We tried to book 2 different included excursions, it bounced back on the tv. That’s why I asked.

There were a few ports where Viking had 2 different included excursions. We did the ATV excursion, and it really wasn’t very good. Drove down a road a bit and drove back. The ATV excursion we did in Isafjordur was much better. Our second trip there, we hired the same guy for a private tour for twice as long, which turned out less $$ for more time.

The Intercontinental hotel is on the highway to Piraeus. It’s pretty close to the port too. However, I imagine that the reason why these hotels are used isn’t proximity, but the ability to get a bus to the hotel. I know the few places we have stayed at in Athens, places closer to the Plaka were on very small streets that bringing a bus there would be……interesting.

In Athens, the cruise ship terminal is in Piraeus. We just asked the taxi to take us there and followed the signs for Viking. Galataport, in Istanbul. Here’s the address, but it’s such a huge complex that I’m sure everyone knows where it is. Kılıçali Paşa Mah. Meclis-i Mebusan Cad. No: 8 İç Kapı No: 102, 34433 Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Türkiye

I know. I assumed it was norovirus too. The news had the numbers wrong though. Case counts were announced daily, and they were no where near 100 passengers. Most was about 2% of the passengers. I have no doubt my info is correct. I was talking to the captain, and he said that he has a policy to never lie to passengers. Since the numbers affected were announced daily, I tend to believe him over a news report.

We stayed here and would stay here again. Fabulous staff and close to everything.

Everyone on the Neptune was VERY careful not to call it norovirus, but a gastrointestinal illness. It did make the last week or so on the ship difficult. The poor waitstaff had to do everything, and they were run off their feet. We ordered room service this morning before disembarking. According to another world cruiser who was behind me in line in immigrations this morning, she said it was crazy on steroids up there. We made a good decision.

No table tennis available on the Neptune.

Looking at an LG on the TV now.

Thanks, this is good to know.

The TVs do have Bluetooth capability, and Viking will modify the TV position for a few circumstances. One of them is a passenger had a Bluetooth amplifier for his hearing aid that he needed in order to be able to hear the TV. I guess the amplifier needed to be plugged into the HDMI port. BTW….the Neptune has closed captioning. According the the Explorer Desk manager, this has been a 3 year fight with LA to get it.

Then I wonder why Viking didn’t offer it for the WC which was there Mar/April of 2023? This kinda pisses me off because I called the WC desk asking about it……as did so many other people I talked to. We were essentially told by Viking that they couldn’t put something together like this because of Covid. I knew it was a BS answer at the time, this just verifies it. There were a lot of unhappy people about this, and a lot of people scrambling to make arrangements off of others when they found this was possible (with a crappier than usual Wi-Fi). This was a bucket list destination which many, including us assumed would be offered, but wasn’t.