Mich3554

I think it has far more to do when you come for dinner. I have noticed a few times when we are dining with friends and dinner seems to go on much longer that the dining room clears out more on one side than the other. I think towards the end of the night, they direct diners to the starboard side, and start clearing out the port side to set up for breakfast the next morning. We have walked out of a 7 pm dinner close to 9:30, being the last people on the port side, but dining is still finishing up on Starboard. That being said, we tend to eat around 7:30 and have gotten seated everywhere.

The only line to board we have ever waited in was for the world cruise last year. This was because there was a delay of US immigration releasing the ship, and all the people who would have trickled in from 11 am on all were allowed to start boarding at 3 pm. Even then, it went fairly quickly and it only took about 30 min. Every other cruise we have taken, there is never a line. Depending on where we are and what we have been doing, we might show up at 11 (when we checked out of our hotel) or we might show up much later (like when we hired a tour guide to drive us from Santiago to Valparaiso, wine tasting along the way plus a private tour of Valparaiso). I think it was nearly 6 when we boarded.

On the tickets you receive for excursions, there will be a cancellation date and time. If you cancel before the date, the excursion costs get credited to your account. If you reserve another excursion, the price will get debited from your onboard account. If the cruise ends and you’ve not spent the credit for the excursion, if you paid for it via ACH check or credit card, it will get refunded to you as a refundable credit. If it was purchased by OBC given to you, then it is a non refundable credit.

As of this past Friday, Viking has not yet announced the 25-26 WC. My Viking contact has said any day now. If the itinerary changes any from the current one, we are going to jump again. I don’t think we will do the Ft Lauderdale to NYC again though. I do concur that the expectations are a bit different from shorter cruises.

Some of the roughest seas we dealt with in last years world cruise when we exited CA, and blew off Santa Barbara trying to get ahead of a storm that was going to hit California, we went waaaay directly south before we started angling to Hawaii.

We have done South America and Chilean Fjords….twice. I’d do it again too. It is just so enthralling to see areas of the world that few get to. It was weird seeing land on both sides of the ship, but absolutely no lights at all.

Room service is a possibility. We used this on a few evenings we got back late from excursions. Viking will not let you go to bed hungry.

Yesterday a year ago, we were getting onto the Neptune in FL. I hope we can do this again, it’s definitely not a ‘one and done’ for us.

Quite excellent. i have sent lots of delicate stuff with ‘cold wash only air dry’ and it comes back perfect. This includes cashmere sweaters, dressy linen knits, lace tops and lined wool dress slacks (which were dry cleaned…..or Viking’s equivalent of it). They are also fabulous at getting out stains, especially grease. I have gotten such that I automatically send stuff to laundry if I wind up wearing part of a meal.

I spoke to the ship manager about this on the Neptune earlier this year and asked him about it. The USB ports on the back are not accessible, and in his tenure on the ship, the ONLY time they got someone in to make it accessible was for a Bluetooth device to amplify the sound for a hearing aid passenger.

We always wind up with a collection of wine glasses in the cabin that we have hauled back to drink in the cabin.

This is not the norm though. I know people who did deliver their meds to the medical center and they were stored for them during the cruise. I can’t explain why the OP had the problems he did, because what he was informed was what *should* have happened. I hope Viking sorts this out for them.

That’s strange. We did the GE on the Bragi in April/May of 2022 and I bought 16. We could only use one per person per new booking.

Yes, you can book a river cruise on board an ocean cruise. No, you cannot book a cruise while on a river, but you can buy $200 vouchers for $100 while on a river cruise that are good for ocean, river and expedition.

Exactly! Viking did this on our Trade Routes cruise, where we’re were supposed to have a day in Barcelona before tossing us off. Unfortunately, we get to the first stop in Spain and are told we are only stopping in Barcelona to disembark….no tours. Turned out, there were protests going on and while that they hadn’t gotten violent, Viking was not willing to take a chance. We had already booked a hotel for an extra 3 days in Barcelona, so it wasn’t a big deal for us, but there were a lot of unhappy people at the end of the cruise needing to get off the ship and go directly to the airport. As for the protests, there was a huge police presence and we did see quite a few demonstrations, but just exited stage right to avoid getting caught up in them.

We have done this twice, once early Dec and second time late Dec. we didn’t encounter any mosquitoes. We did Iguazu Falls early Jan and didn’t encounter mosquitoes on either the Argentina or Brazil side. ETA: I call myself the designated mosquito decoy. I had a zillion bites on my arms when we were in Fiji. DH had none. Most unfair!

We had a woman on our world cruise that came on board with a 138 day of Humira. I know it’s not the same thing, but she traveled with a carry on bag full of her meds and cold packs. Her meds were stored in the medical facility and she went to get them as necessary. She got a vacation override, like many do. She then had a spare suitcase for her return home.

The Blue Mosque is set up such that if they say you step inside, it’s not just sticking your head in the entrance, it’s utterly amazing to see the inside of this (unfortunately, last time I was in it was in 2019, where they were renovating it so there was scaffolding up. The renovations were completed this year, but it wasn’t open to the public as it was the end of Ramadan). The underground Cistern is interesting to see for its architecture. When we have been offered the opportunity to do the carpets, we told them ‘been, there, done that, have carpets’ and went off and did our own thing. We do have carpets, but bought from a dealer not in the tourist area (my Turkish friend took us to one the locals buy from….and she negotiated for us). Watching the carpets made is interesting though.

What I did when I had problems with WiFi on board (and this only worked while we were in port), was tether my iPad to my cellular account using my eSIM. It did work very well, particularly the time we had utterly impossible internet and I needed a constant signal to book excursions on the next cruise. While we were in port, I was always tethered as we had a global plan that included more data than needed.

I am really an introvert and don’t particularly want to socialize, especially before coffee! On our river cruise last year, I didn’t find it onerous to find an end of the able. You can either talk or not.

The menu for the next cruise is usually not seen on the TV until the new people board. IME, doing back to backs, the menu doesn’t repeat in a consistent manner, so the menu sequence in the 15 days of one cruise may not be the same sequence of menus for the next 15 days. We did see some menus that were just for 2 days, and I think I saw some for 4 days too.

This is correct. On our last cruise, we did whatever vineyard there was an excursion at…..and bought wine. By the end of the cruise, we realized we needed to drink at least a bottle/day, or we were going to be hauling wine home along with the 8 bottles of scotch. So we brought a bottle of wine every evening we went to dinner (both WC and the Restaurant). They open it, pour it and refill glasses as necessary.

Both beds and food are subjective too. For instance, I just read a review of someone who was on a cruise (Bali to Sydney, I think) and they found the Indonesian food spicy. DH spent nearly a year in Indonesia and found the food spiced down.

We bought Marks and Spencer’s salt and vinegar in Dublin. They were just ok, very mild vinegar flavor. We ate them, but they weren’t a good substitute. I think you were going the opposite direction from us in June, so they got a chance to restock in Isafjordur before the second party hit the grocery store. We must have screwed up their inventory that month! When we boarded for the last time in Hawaii before leaving on the world cruise, I noticed a lot of staff boarding the ship with shopping bags full of chips. I get it now!

Actually, on the Madeira stop where you get a chance to sample a local beverage at a little bar, they had Lay’s salt and vinegar chips. Unknown to me, DH bought 2 bags on his way out of the bar (big bags). Since then, these chips have been a running joke between us. We wiped out the stock on the shelves in the grocery store at the mall attached to the dock in Singapore. We also found them in Isafjordur, Iceland. We found them at a few other stops on the world cruise, and usually in the most unexpected places.