garywatson

I don't know them personally but after a lot of faxxing of documents they were finally allowed to board and are very happy and relieved.

That's what I suggested, heck if I were the dad I would demand they board without me (else, hear about it over and over for decades how the ruined vacation was my fault). But the wife is fearful of the challenges of taking a cruise alone with two young children.

They are from far away, and in any case most DMV's won't make you a photo ID while you wait. The passport office will, if you have a passport, but he doesn't.

If they wanted to get all forensic about it, they could check the EXIF metadata on his phone to confirm the d/l photo was taken at their home. They could call his home state DMV to confirm validity (but that sounds difficult).

The wife has her d/l and they have a photo of his d/l, and presumably they match address and surname, so it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to let him on. Just wondering if they have any flexibility or is this sort of an iron-clad TSA kind of rule.

Sorry, I corrected the typo - they do not have passports. They have birth certificates.

A young couple, husband wife and two kids, is stressing out about their cruise tomorrow out of Canaveral because the husband lost his wallet earlier today and thus no longer has his drivers license. Wife has her DL and both have their birth certificates, and they have the photo of his DL that they uploaded as part of the booking process. What's his odds of being allowed to board, and are there any magic words that might make it more likely? This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, so I always travel with at least two (and usually four) acceptable means of identification, and I don't keep them all in one place.

How much rain would there have to be before Royal refunds your Beach Club payment? Apart from part of the restaurant, I don't recall there being much shelter from passing storms.

As a solo if I pre-pay or otherwise book a Specialty, and I show up with a second person, they would let that person pay, right? Otherwise the seat would go empty. Just wondering as you might find at peak times that someone would be happy to join you if reservations are tight.

There wasn't one for Independence in a week (April 24) so I started one.

One thing which just occurred to me is that with the 8pm MDR time, if the food and/or service is horrible, you might not have enough time to go to the Windjammer before it closes at 9. This is sub-optimal.

I'm on Independence in a week and the app says breakfast every day in MDR (the time varies) and lunch only on the sea day, no doubt to relieve crowding in WJ. If the weather turns bad and they skip Nassau and/or CocoCay then I'd expect they would add lunches in MDR as needed. Of course if the weather is that bad, lots of people might be too sick to eat.

I'll be on Independence in a bit over a week and will give it a try.

Changing the MAC address of a Mac running macOS is pretty straightforward, and all you need for this is the Terminal. Follow the steps below to learn how. Open Terminal. Enter the following command to know the MAC addresses currently assigned to your current network interfaces: ifconfig. Make sure to note the original MAC address down somewhere. en0 represents Ethernet, whereas en1 denotes wireless network (Wi-Fi). If you’ve already got a MAC address in mind to assign to your Mac, skip to the next step. However, if you don’t, use type the following command into the Terminal to generate one: openssl rand -hex 6 | sed ‘s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//’. Disconnect the network connection for which you want to change the MAC address. In the Terminal, enter sudo ifconfig en0 ether 21-A5-CE-DC-C2-33. Subsequently, enter your password and hit return. Replace the MAC address with the one you want to assign to your Mac. Similarly, replace en0 with en1 if you wish to change the MAC address for your Wi-Fi network. Once that’s done, turn on your Mac’s Wi-Fi and type ifconfig to verify if the MAC address is changed successfully. Do note that the MAC address defaults back to the original MAC address upon every boot. As such, if you need to change your MAC address every time you use it, you can create a script that does it for you each time the system boots up.

I think you have to sudo it on the command line on a mac.

OK yes I see now - it will let you put in the wifi password on secure networks, but won't let you put in a password into a login screen on a "public" wifi like the Royal ships have. Well then I will try a workaround which involves turning off my watch, spoofing my laptop's mac address to be my Apple Watch, get all logged in, then change the laptop's mac back to default then turn on the watch. It should be seen as the same device.

Now that the Apple Watch seems to offer password entry for WiFi, I'm thinking I can connect it as my one Zoom device and use it on CocoCay instead of bringing my phone onto the island. This would provide a certain minimal level of connectivity if something important comes up. Has anybody tried this?

I don't consider myself a food gourmet - the food at Golden Corral is adequate for me. I'm just mystified at the poor quality of the meats on Royal, especially the beef. I don't know where in the world they are going to find such tough and odd-tasting meat - the frozen meat at the Dollar Store is better, and I'm including Chops in this comparison. Oh, sometimes it tastes more-or-less restaurant quality, but usually not. I'm on Independence in a couple weeks and have booked Chops for a lunch and two dinners, and will try the MDR and Jammer the rest of the time, and report back here because if there's one thing I know it's that subjective reviews of the food are in high demand here on the Cruise Critic Boards.

I was going through my mom's things and found my original birth certificate from 60 years ago. Still in the stamped envelope.

Now that I'm Diamond I think I get 4 servings of booze per day for free, and that's about two times what I'm likely to drink. I would have to really chug them down for the liquor package to be worth it for me. One thing Royal should think about as they are jacking up the prices, is that it will motivate people to bring prescription Xanax or Oxycontin or (illegal) pot edibles with them to make the booze last longer, which will cause all sorts of problems.

If the GPS is saying 4.5 hours, you have to add an hour for pee stops etc so that has you getting there at 1:30 assuming zero traffic disruptions/accidents/congestion. That's cutting things too close in my opinion. If you are going to be late you might as well turn around and go back home and kiss goodbye all your money and potential happiness. One thing you should do is starting at 6am at the latest, re-do the navigation to see if the 4.5 hours prediction is still holding (and leave the app open so it continually re-calculates.) I once re-did the nav on a trip to Vegas and instead of 3 hours is was suddenly showing 7 hours, because of a fatal wreck on I-15, and it took us longer than 7 hours to actually get there - luckily Vegas never sails away and most stuff is open 24x7.

It's been a standard feature for CCTV systems for a while now that you can tell it to detect objects that have been left unattended for more than a programmed amount of time. With a little bit of software work this could detect sunbeds with towels or other stuff on them that nobody has occupied for 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. A bonus is that the attendant could play the video back for anybody who complains about their stuff being tossed overboard.

There should be a sunbed attendant. If you are going to leave your bed for more than 30 minutes you would have to check in with him to get permission. If you come put down a towel and leave the area immediately, the towel is removed immediately unless you get a special permission slip for a really good reason. I think a lot of the hogging is in response to the lack of policing of the rules and it's the only way to get a bed because of all the other hogs.

Got the cancel email on Mar 17 and today Mar 23 I see a pending refund on my Amex card. Not stressing over the refund itself - I just want them to finish messing around with my account so I can make other purchases without breaking anything.