boffoboffo

Some random musings as we approach 120 hours until sail away and 36 hours until….drive away? Of course the temperature here the last couple of days and tomorrow has been in the low teen’s and very spring like. The cats are very much looking forward to not having the person around who insists on sitting on their couch forcing them to sleep in an almost literal pile. Will probably finish packing tomorrow and immediately start wondering what it was that I forgot, even though I don’t recall ever forgetting to pack anything on any trip we’ve ever been on. I did download some TV shows to watch offline and downloaded offline Google maps as well, just in case. If you’re someone who likes negative reviews or complaining about every little thing then you should probably look elsewhere. I’m very easy going and not entitled and set my expectations accordingly so NCL would have to screw up really bad for me to be anything but satisfied with my vacation. Too many people I see writing reviews online where they seemingly decide before they even get on the ship that they’re going to have a bad time and then do everything in their power to make sure they do. I just don’t get it. I’m not a foodie or anything like that so I don’t have a high bar to clear for me to enjoy a meal. I will almost certainly be happy with all the food I eat. I never cruised in the before-COVID times so I’m not able to compare anything to how much better it was “back in the day”. I did get to experience things like twice daily room servicing(don’t miss it. Never thought it was necessary), the nightly blue plate special at O’Sheehan’s(do miss that. It kept their menu from getting boring fairly quickly) and hash browns for breakfast(may have to consider smuggling a bunch of McDonald’s ones aboard) but not having these things didn’t ruin my last cruise, so I doubt it’ll ruin this one.

Before our first cruise everyone in the roll call thread was so gung ho about the meet and greet and slot pull and gift exchange and I was thinking this all sounds like fun. Then I stopped and thought about it a bit and realized that it actually sounded like no fun at all. I’d walk in and obviously have no interest in sitting at a table where someone else is sitting. So I’d find an empty one in the back corner of the room hoping that nobody would notice me back there. So what point would there actually be in even bothering to go? So I never have and never will. It does make cruising with my mom difficult at times because she’s one to initiate small talk at any moment where there’s silence and some other person around. And then complain afterward about how the other person wouldn’t stop yapping if they take the time to answer her questions instead of just letting her talk. I’m starting to think she may have been a strong influence towards my present day uneasiness or discomfort in social settings. But she’s happy to get out of her house and feel included in the life of one of her kids, so I’m willing to deal with it.

This is a post for the introverted types. Three cruises has been enough for me to come up with a decent list of ways to avoid people. For the most part I’ve found that the ship you’re on doesn’t really matter all that much because people are very predictable so it becomes fairly easy to know exactly what to expect from the masses around you, so then you can just do what they aren’t. Tip # 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: Should go without saying to anyone who is uncomfortable in social situations with strangers but at all costs avoid the elevator. The stairs usually end up being faster anyway and you’re not stuck in a small box with a bunch of people where it’s guaranteed someone is going to try to engage you in awkward small talk. You should already cringe at the torture that is a public elevator and just don’t risk it. Stay away. That’s the end of my numbered list. The elevator is the worst. Avoid the hot tubs for basically the exact same reason. You can try them later in the evening or night as they’re typically less crowded and if you get lucky and find an empty one maybe bring a Baby Ruth bar or two with you to add to the water and hopefully discourage anyone from joining you. The pool deck will be busy during the day. The casino and other indoor venues will be busy at night. The Waterfront or promenade deck never seems to get too busy. If you want to get sun during the day just keep going up decks and further away from the pool. Everyone wants to be near the pool and the pool bar and the buffet so everyone will be there. There are usually some nice open areas with minimal foot traffic two or three decks above the pool towards the front of the ship. Otherwise wait until anytime after supper time if you want to hang out near the pool. It’ll be fairly quiet. Some of the bars/venues aren’t open during the day but their seating areas are still accessible. Speciality dining restaurants would fall into this category as well and they include window seats. In many cases you could sit in one of these places for hours during the day and see no one else aside from a couple staff members. The Waterfront on Breakaway class ships or promenade deck on Jewel class ships are always a nice quiet place that also get you closer to the water. The sunny side will always be busier than the shadier side. The Breakaway ships do also have another non-wraparound outside deck beneath the Waterfront deck. Aside from shuffleboard players and crew no one ever goes down there. If you just want to stand and watch the ocean alone, that’s the place to go. Some places are kind of impossible to avoid crowds like the buffet or the theatre. That being said I’ve never had anyone ever try to engage me in unwanted discussion in either of those places. Guess people have better things to do. Avoid lineups. People are waiting for something and getting bored and assume you would rather talk to them than be bored in silence. Wear the most generic shirts possible. A shirt from a previous cruise destination or a favourite sports team are considered a conversation starter by far too many people. Now they know something about you so they can fake interest while they talk about themselves. The biggest most obvious headphones you can find are always a good idea to have on your head even if you’re not listening to anything. No one but you knows you’re not listening to anything so you can easily ignore people without appearing rude. If you’re just wanting to sit and relax outside enjoying the view or the sun bring a book even if you’re not reading it. If you’re just sitting there quietly or on your cell phone someone will inevitably think you’re lonely and take that as an invitation to sit beside you. If you appear to be reading, preferably some obscure, boring sounding book from some unknown author people are more likely to assume you’d rather not be disturbed and won’t attempt to talk about the book with you since they know nothing about it. If you need to get a drink the bars towards the middle of the ship tend to be busiest(atrium, pool) and then they get less busy as you get closer to the ends of the ship. For as crowded as the buffet gets the bar in there almost never has a line, for some reason. On sea days the early risers start getting up around 7 and the masses closer to 8 and looking for breakfast around 8:30 to 9. Nothing is open but aside from a handful of other guests and a bunch of crew cleaning you will have the ship to yourself if you get up at 5 or 6. It is so worth it for that and the sunrise. Don’t be feel like you’re wasting your holiday if you decide to just escape to the solitude of your cabin for a few hours. You paid for it and it’s guaranteed to not have strangers in it. For excursions the ship offered ones are usually going to be busy and feature waiting in lines and being stuck sitting close to a bunch of people in some sort of bus or van. Third party excursions are typically much less busy. If you’re in Bermuda avoid the bus stops. Our last cruise was to Bermuda and I only had three random people during that whole 7 days decide to randomly start a conversation with me. One was some drunk guy on the ship who saw me wearing a Bruins shirt and took that as a conversation starter. The other two were local Bermuda women who appeared to just be hanging out at or near bus stops looking to engage in conversation with tourists. I think that’s a good enough list for now to get you started. If I think of anything else or discover anything new while on board I’ll make sure to include it.

Wasn’t going to do it because I’m cheap and a $7 reservation fee sounds dumb but I went ahead and pre booked our parking at the port. https://portnola.com/cruise/parking-directions I guess it’ll be one less thing we need to pay for after the cruise so that’s something. And having never been to the New Orleans port before while I assume there is plenty of parking available I don’t know that for sure so it felt better to be safe than sorry. It is nice that after paying $45 per day to park on the pier in Manhattan $25 per day sounds like a bargain in comparison. Only one more week to go.

I’ve driven various parts of Illinois before. It’s easy to just think about the Chicagoland area and forget that almost everything south of there, which is most of the state is just farm land. However, having also driven all the way across Kansas before, any other state is exciting by comparison.

Was checking out Lambert’s Cafe to see where that was on the route and how that would work out time wise. About 8 hours from the cruise terminal when it finally dawned on me just how much we’d be pushing it to try and get home in two days. Assuming getting off the ship and in the car around 8am if we included gas and bathroom and food breaks along the way we may end up on the road until 8 or 9pm. And then a second day of roughly the same length, albeit with an earlier start but also losing a hour with a time zone change was going to make for a very, very long two days. So I quickly re-kajiggered the route knowing that Sikeston is an 8 hour drive which seems like a more comfortable length of time to be on the road. So the new plan has day 1: Same planned route as before but stopping for the night in Sikeston. Guess we’ll have no excuse but to try Lambert’s Cafe now. Day 2: Very similar route to before but instead of staying on I-55 to I-70 we’ll be taking I-57 to I-70 and stopping for the night in Toledo. Leaves a nice leisurely third day of: Should mean we’ll still get home sometime on Tuesday morning so that’s decent and nowhere near as exhausting as the original itinerary would have been. Also stopped at the bank today to get some American money for the trip and I’ve got to say there are few things more painful than the large chunk of money you lose when converting CAD$ to USD$.

Since I’m running out of pre-trip stuff to talk about but need to keep up with fresh new content to keep the masses coming back and everyone like random pictures here’s a post about the previous time we crossed paths with the Breakaway. Back in September 2022 we were in between our Gem and Getaway cruises and felt like getting out and going somewhere so we did a spur-of-the-moment week long road trip to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. Fundy NP is fairly centrally located with Moncton about 1 hour north and Saint John an hour south so we were going to just spend the week seeing the sights up and down the coastline. This is the height of the Canada/New England cruise season and Saint John is a regular stop on those itineraries so I checked the port schedule to see what ships would be in Saint John each day we were in the area. On Thursday the Breakaway, Joy, and Voyager of the Seas were all scheduled to be there so we decided to go to Saint John that day. At that point we hadn’t booked this cruise yet but since our first ever booked cruise was supposed to have been on the Breakaway it seemed like a great opportunity to see what we had missed. Got to the port area fairly early in the morning and the Breakaway was already docked and the crowds had already dispersed to do whatever it is that someone does in Saint John during an 8-10 hour port stop. I assume be underwhelmed by a visit to the Reversing Falls or get on a bus to take you somewhere else away from the city. I like Saint John but it’s not exactly a prime tourist destination. After that we headed to the Irving Nature Park which is a really cool place on the outskirts of town. I would recommend it as a quiet place to check out if you ever do a Canada/New England cruise if you enjoy the outdoors and want to avoid anyplace that would have a large excursion crowd. It’s a better place to see the dramatic tide changes that happen than the much more famous Reversing Falls because it’s much easier to spend the required few hours there to be able to notice the change. We got a trail that overlooked the Bay of Fundy and got to watch as the Joy sailed into port. There was also a seal teasing us in the water beneath us popping its’ head up for a few seconds at a time. After we finished up at the park we got on the highway to head back up north to our campsite. Entering back into the downtown area we saw the two NCL ships now docked together side-by-side, along with the Voyager of the Seas segregated by itself at a separate dock. And that was the last we saw of the Breakaway until we actually are allowed to get on board in just 8 more days, some 1235 days after we were originally supposed to for our COVID cancelled cruise.

Of slightly less relevance for people mostly interested what happens while on the cruise since the cruise will be over, but I’ll still be posting pictures and stuff from our ride home so I’ll post that route as well. We’ll be looking at the fastest way possible so back on to the main interstates. Hopeful to do it in two days but we have an extra day available if we need it. So day 1: Looks like we’ll just be taking I-55 almost the entire way to our stop just outside St. Louis. We’ll skim through a bit of the eastern edge of Arkansas to be able to check it off our visited list. And the aforementioned Memphis donut place could certainly be considered. Day 2: I-70 to I-69 to state highway 24 to I-75. I’m pretty sure we’ve driven a decent chunk of this route on one of our previous road trips as it seems very familiar. I’m pretty sure my wife got pulled over for speeding somewhere between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne. She managed to charm the cop out of giving her a ticket. Probably won’t be looking to make any major stops or side trips on the drive home and there appear to be no Buc-ee’s anywhere nearby to distract us.

I went ahead and reworked the route we’d have to take to include Buc-ee’s and the one in Athens, AL would only add about 20 minutes to our driving time. Although at this point with all the hype it’s being given I’m wondering if we should just cancel the cruise and spend a week at Buc-ee’s instead.

Roughly 318 hours now until sail away. I switch from counting down in days to hours at day 13 since it’s now really easy to keep track of in my head. Since there have been a lot of people making suggestions for things to see along the way I decided I wouldn’t put off posting our most likely route to get there any longer. Day 1 will have little or no time for diversions since it’s already enough driving as it is. Days 2 and 3 are much more open to stops or getting sidetracked off our route. Day 1 Home to Cave City,KY All major highways on this day. No need to take any back ways while in Ontario since we’ve already seen all that before. No desire to take longer than necessary to get through Michigan because we wouldn’t subject our car to having to drive on those roads anymore than it has to. On one previous occasion we have driven this route as far down as the northern outskirts of Cincinnati so most of this day will be a route we’ve driven before, albeit not recently and not often. We will enter the Central time zone right before stopping so we will gain an extra hour on the clock. Will likely go do a trail or two at Mammoth Caves which is 8 minutes from our motel if we aren’t too tired. Day 2 Cave City, KY to West Point, MS Now we’ll switch to the back roads with the option to get back on the interstate if we waste too much time somewhere and need to pick up the pace. Looks like we should be avoiding any major cities this way. We’ll pass through Glasgow and Scottsville in Kentucky. Murfreesboro and Columbia in Tennessee. Skim through the north west corner of Alabama passing near Florence and finally into Mississippi going through Tupelo. I haven’t investigated the route too closely so the current plan is if we see something that makes someone say “Hey, that looks interesting” we’ll probably stop. Day 3 West Point, MS to New Orleans, LA Looks like it’ll be almost entirely Mississippi we’ll be driving through on this day and once again avoiding any major cities. Looks like some of the bigger places in Mississippi would be Louisville, Carthage, and another Columbia. Louisiana it doesn’t look like we go through much aside from what’s at either end of the Lake Pontchartrain causeway. It looks like we go through a couple national forests this way and there’s a few national wildlife refuges as well. Our motel is close to Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge so we were planning to check that out after getting checked in. From there it will be a 15-20 minute drive to the cruise terminal for day 4 and then, unless the captain is really nice or really drunk someone else can take care of the driving for the next week.

One of my favourite parts of a road trip through the US is all the various franchises that are super popular yet restricted to a certain geographic area. I guess it makes it feel more special when you come across a White Castle or a Piggly Wiggly that otherwise wouldn’t seem all that special at all. *Apologies to any White Castle or Piggly Wiggly fans who might have felt like that was a dig at your fine establishments*

Two weeks from today is embarkation day which also means it’s only 11 days until we hit the road. So what does our itinerary look like and what plans do we have so far? For our first two cruises we stuck exclusively with NCL offered excursions as it seems is often the case for inexperienced cruisers. On our second cruise I was rather happy about it since our itinerary kept changing right before and during the cruise. Nice to know all time changes or cancellations will just be automatically taken care of for you. Our third cruise was to Bermuda where we were docked for three days. Since you can just come and go as you please and you’d have to be rather stupid to miss the ship(there were a handful that decided they wanted to cut it super close)we opted to just venture out on our own and got bus passes. It was nice to avoid the inevitable crowds and standing around waiting that comes with a cruise ship excursion. So for this cruise we’ve got the courage to not just restrict ourselves to the NCL offerings. Day 1:Sail away at 5pm. Moderno for dinner at 7:30. Cruise tradition dictates that we will get on board and head to the MDR for lunch. Plenty of time until the rooms are ready and almost everyone will either be exploring or in the buffet, so this is the quieter way to kill some time. Having been on the Getaway previously and the Escape just four months ago will make the time until cabins are ready weird as we’ll already know the entire ship layout without having to take any time to explore. Moderno we originally scheduled for day 2 but rebooked it to day 1. The possibility of eating out on the Waterfront while cruising down the Mississippi seemed intriguing. Day 2 Sea Day:No plans. I did check and Burn the Floor reservations are available for the two sea days. Having seen the show on the Getaway it seems likely we’ll pass on it again. It’s an Ok show with talented performers but straight dancing only has so much appeal and there’s usually so much going on at once on the stage that it’s hard to see it all. I’m going to assume that my wife and mom will spend some time hiding ducks around the ship this day. On our last cruise I found four ducks and each of them found none but somehow they both became addicted to cruise ducks as a result. It’s been three-and-a-half months of them constantly talking about ducks or finding places to buy ducks. The collection is already packed and ready to go. Day 3 Cozumel 8-3:This would be swim with a manatee day for my wife at Chankanaab Park. There are NCL excursions available to go here but they are roughly twice the price of just taking a taxi there and buying an admission ticket yourself. Since neither me or my mom has any interest in swimming with any animals we’ll just buy tickets at the gate but we did prepurchase the manatee swim ticket. Not sure if Chankanaab is willing or able to refund this if the ship misses this port for whatever reason but this is the only cash we’re paying out in advance to a third party, so the bigger deal would be my wife missing the manatees instead of the $80 we could potentially be out. https://cozumelparks.com/en/chankanaab/ https://www.*****cozumel/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=mybusiness&utm_campaign=Cozumel Day 4 Roatan 8-5:This would be hug a sloth day for my wife. We opted to book directly with Daniel Johnson Monkey and Sloth Hangout. NCL did not have an option for this so I can’t compare prices directly but $40 each for monkeys and sloths along with an island tour and stop at a beach seems a hard price to beat. Their website gives off the impression that they very much cater to cruise passengers and making sure you get back to the ship with time to spare. Also don’t pay until you get there, so if the ship misses the port or arrives late there’s no concern of being out any money. https://monkeyandslothhangout.com/site/tour/island-tour/ Day 5 Harvest Caye 8-4:30:This is our only port with an NCL excursion booked. We’ll be doing the Placencia lagoon wildlife and mangrove excursion. With free at sea credit plus Latitude rewards 10% discount it was only about $100 for the two of us, so that seemed reasonable. And at only an hour-and-a-half in length from 8:30-10 that will still leave us plenty of time to explore Harvest Caye once we’re done. https://www.ncl.com/ca/en/shore-excursions/BPI_03/Placencia-Lagoon-Wildlife-Mangrove ?destination=Caribbean+Cruises%2CExtraordinary+Journeys%2CPanama+Canal+Cruises&port=BPI&sort=searchWeight&sortOrder=asc&perPage=12&startingRecord=12 Day 6 Costa Maya 7-3:This is just going to be an explore the port day. None of the excursions sounded overly appealing to any of us and it looks like there’s a fairly nice port area with plenty of shops and amenities right off the ship. It will also save us having to get up and get ready and have breakfast all before 7am. After the laid back Bermuda cruise where there were never any time restraints to worry about I’m sure all these 7 and 8am docking times and rushed breakfasts will have gotten old by this point. Day 7 Sea day:I might take advantage of not having a schedule this day and sleep in until 5:15am instead of my normal wake up time of 5. That’s the normal time I get up during a regular working weekday and my body doesn’t usually like to let me change that. On our first cruise this initially annoyed me until I remembered I was on a cruise ship and there are plenty of places I could go and walk around. That was when I discovered the sheer bliss that is a cruise ship between the hours of 5 and 7 in the morning. On the Gem it had the added benefit of the kitchen being right under the promenade deck at the back of the ship. So I could hang out there with no one else ever even passing by watching the wake while smelling the breads and pastries baking. I was tempted to go back to our cabin, grab my mattress and just sleep there instead. Then other people start waking up and the day just goes downhill from there. Day 8 New Orleans 8am:Quick breakfast. Maybe get to watch people the next table over fill Ziploc bag after Ziploc bag after Ziploc bag full of buffet food to take home like we got to on our Getaway cruise last year. Get off the ship as quickly as possible to get on the road for what’s currently scheduled as a 10 hour driving day.

For the second time this winter we actually have snow on the ground here. It’s not much, but that combined with Facebook reminding me that last year at this time I was on a cruise has me eager to be in cruise mode. Actually I am the stereotypical Canadian as winter is my favourite season and I wear shorts and t-shirts all year round inside or outside so this is more my type of weather. This post will mainly be for anyone who has never cruised before or never with NCL before. For anyone that’s cruised NCL before you’re probably familiar with this stuff but feel free to include any tips or tricks that I may have missed. As I said previously we booked this cruise on December 30, 2022. An inside cabin and we booked it ourselves via the NCL website. Never used a travel agent and have never felt it necessary since it takes all of 10 minutes to go through and book ourself and we never have flights or anything else to deal with. We did book using a Cruise First certificate. More details here: https://www.ncl.com/ca/en/cruisefirst-program They have a constantly running program where you pay $150 and get a $300 certificate to use on a future cruise. However, once a month they usually run a promo for 5 or 6 days where you can pay $250 for a $500 certificate. In order to maximize the savings I always wait until the $250 for $500 promo is running then I buy one and immediately book my next cruise. I’ve looked at the Cruise Next promotions while on board and perhaps I’m missing something but Cruise First seems like the better promo for me at least. When booking since none of us are drinkers I deselect the free drink package from the free at sea offers. The 20% gratuity adds a big chunk to your cruise fare and nearly that same amount gets added back on when I add the prepaid service charges. Service charges(ie. mandatory tipping charge) can either be added when you book the cruise and then just get added on to your cruise fare and can be payed whenever up until final payment day. They can be added via the app or website whenever you want between booking and before embarkation and the full amount gets charged to your credit card immediately. Or you can wait and they’ll just be added to your onboard account daily while you’re on the cruise and then get charged to your credit card on disembarkation day. On our previous cruises we always added the unlimited pop package but will be skipping it this time and trying to get by on just the free drink options. Quick math shows you need about 4 pops per person per day for it to pay for itself and we don’t get close to that. My wife really only likes root beer and since they switched from Pepsi to Coke they no longer offer root beer. That means she’s lucky if she has one per day and I usually go for about 2 or 3, so it’s just not worth it. My wife is a water snob and will drink nothing but Aquafina bottled water at home, but she actually likes the NCL tap water. Only tap water she has ever liked. Continuing with free at sea promotions we will have on speciality dining meal at Moderno’s. The mandatory gratuity for this is well worth it. Reservations become available 120 days before sailing which in this case was the last full day of our previous cruise. It seemed a little weird booking dining reservations for our cruise four months away while already on a different cruise. Unfortunately there’s no way to cancel or change the reservations from the app so when we decided we wanted to change the night we were dining in that required calling in to customer service and having them switch it. Quick phone call at least. For internet we’ll just be using the free 150 minutes per person that we get. This usually ends up being plenty and if I need more my mom never uses her so I just steal them. At least with some Canadian cell phone providers finally having some plans that include US roaming for no extra cost instead of the $12-15 per day that some providers used to charge I’ll still have cellular access until we get into the open water. We only have one NCL excursion booked so I’ll get $50(technically $64ish since the NCL website converts everything to CAD$)value out of that perk. I’ll detail our port plans in the next post. On March 3, 2023 exactly one year to the day before embarkation we received the following email from NCL: I had brief excitement from the “or better” part but we just got move 6 or 7 rooms down the hall into the same type of room. No idea what the operational needs might be, so if anyone has any insight or experience they can offer that’d be nice. We do share a wall with the medical centre so it could be for quarantine needs, I suppose. Until I know otherwise I’m just going to assume some VIP desperately wanted our 5th deck interior cabin so we got bumped for them. After booking cruises I do bookmark their pages on the NCL website and check the prices every week or two to see if they’ve dropped. Up until you’ve made your final payment it is usually fairly easy to just call in and get them to change your booking to the new lower price. For this cruise the price dropped on two separate occasions so my wife called in each time to get the price adjusted. Each was a 10-15 minute long phone call and we ended up saving just over $300 total from the original price we booked it for so it’s worth keeping an eye on. Room upgrade bidding becomes available at 110 days before sailing. I put in a minimum bid for an upgrade to an ocean view cabin since we really don’t care if we get an upgrade or not. An inside cabin is fine. Haven’t heard anything yet and at this point I’m not expecting it since attempted mock bookings show very few available cabins for booking at this point. On our previous three cruises we have always booked inside and put in bids to upgrade to balcony. Our first cruise was during the 50% capacity days so I went with a minimum bid with no real doubt that it would go through since there were going to be so many empty cabins. 5 days before sailing we got the email we’d been upgraded. The second cruise seemed to be filling up fast so I went $20 or $30 over minimum for a balcony and got the email on day 2 of the cruise that our bid wasn’t accepted. The third cruise I went minimum bid again and got an email 60 days before sailing that we’d been upgraded which was a huge surprise it came through so early. A balcony was nice to have but we had no problems with the inside cabin so we’re not in the “once you’ve done balcony you never go back” class. Do I have any secrets or tips to offer for anyone looking to increase their chances at an upgrade? No. Not really. Seems random to me. I’d say make mock bookings to get an idea how many I booked cabins there are and then based on just how much you want an upgraded cabin bid as much as you’re comfortable paying for it without doing something stupid like bidding so much that it would have been cheaper to just book the upgraded room originally. For the very first time a couple weeks ago we became shareholders of NCL. Kept reading about the free onboard credit shareholders get on every cruise they take and finally got around to doing it. I’m sure financial advisors would say that is an absolutely horrible reason to buy 100 shares of almost any company but we had some money sitting around in another investment not doing much so it didn’t feel like this was costing us anything. So we sent in the forms for this and our three upcoming booked cruises over the next two years and roughly 48 hours later the $100 credit was added to each of our future cruises. Very quick and painless and we usually end each cruise with somewhere in the vicinity of $100 in onboard charges so it’ll be nice to have that free money leaving us with a small bill at the end of the cruise. Pre check in became available this past Sunday at 21 days before sailing. For our last cruise it actually went live between 8 and 9 EST the night before, so we were hopeful that would happen again, but my wife stayed up and wasn’t able to get in until right on midnight. Got everything entered in and 10:30 was the earliest time available. Different from the NYC 9:30 time slot but from everything I’ve heard the New Orleans port doesn’t do as good a job at separating the incoming and outgoing passengers from each other as New York does, so I guess it makes sense to delay things a bit. In the 15-20 or so minutes it took for my wife to get finish ours and get to my moms check-in the earliest time slot was now 11. So there must have been a lot of people sitting there waiting to check-in as early as possible. Edocs with luggage tags were available just a few hours later, so we’ve got everything printed and ready. Bags are actually mostly packed already aside from the shorts that I still need for normal day-to-day use here. I think that covers just about everything that’s been done between booking and now. Haven’t made any show reservations, if there are even any shows left that can be booked in advance and aren’t doing anything like Vibe or the thermal suite. Next up in a few days will be our plans in each port.

Looked up Hot Springs and looks like it will be further out of our way than Arkansas already is, so doubt we’ll work it in. Didn’t have to look up Mammoth Cave because our stop the first night is in Cave City which happens to be right there. Only issue there is we probably won’t make it there until late afternoon and plan to be on the road again early morning, so despite us essentially stopping there it still might not work out time wise and energy wise after 9 hours of driving.

Thanks for the various suggestions of things to do. None of us are drinkers so we’ll leave the bourbon and whiskey behind for others who will appreciate it more. As far as things we do enjoy nature stops would probably rank at the top of the list, so a National Park would certainly be of interest. My wife enjoys bird photography and is hoping to rack up a few new life list species during this trip. As far as the route we’ll be driving I’ll go over that on more detail in a future post. Basically I figure out how much driving we want to do each day and then find the cheapest motel within about 50km of there and that’s where we’ll stop for the night. The first day we’ll be going the fastest way possible to get to Kentucky and hopefully beyond the area where we’ll have to worry about bad winter weather(London, Ontario. I already know if it’ll be anywhere it’ll be in London). After that, and the reason why we went with three days to get there instead of two I’ll be switching Google Maps to avoid highways and we’ll be taking the back roads instead. Interstates are great for getting from point A to B quickly but they tend to be boring and avoid most of what makes each state unique. On the way home it’ll be fastest way possible since we’re hoping to do it in two days and we’ll be adding a couple hours to the distance for Arkansas and losing an hour when we switch back to the eastern time zone. We’ve got a third day available to use if we decide it’s too much driving and need to change plans on the fly. I’ll show more specific maps in a future post and will include pictures from our drive to and from.

I’m more of an apologizing for everything Canadian than I am an “eh” Canadian. Sorry.

I’ve followed a few of these types of posts in the past and always appreciate the people who take the time to do them. So I figured I’d give it a try this time in the hope that it maybe helps out or entertains even one person. Plus I enjoy long-winded and rambling story telling and I’m ready to get into cruise mode ASAP so this seems like it could be fun for me. I guess I’ll start with backstory before I get into the specifics of this trip. On this trip it will be me and my wife, along with my mom and we’re from Ontario, Canada. That means I will be using metric units and not converting them for anyone, I’ll be saying “pop” instead of “soda”, and anytime I type “about” I expect you’ll read it as “aboot”. I apologize in advance if this offends anyone. For me and my wife this will be our fourth cruise, all with NCL. All our previous cruises sailed out of NYC since it’s only about a 7 1/2 hour drive from home. We sailed on the Gem to the Caribbean in March/April of 2022, the Getaway to the Caribbean in February of 2023, and the Escape in October/November 2023. So another cruise only four months after the last one is pretty quick turnaround for us. This will also be my mom’s fourth cruise as we invited her along on our last two and she did one on her own 15 or 16 years ago on Royal Caribbean. She didn’t invite us. We are currently booked in an inside cabin and my mom has her own solo studio. Prior to trying cruising me and my wife tended to opt for road trips for most of our vacations. We’ve always enjoyed the process of getting there as much as we have the destination. Over the years we’ve driven across Canada to Vancouver and the other way to Newfoundland, so we’ve driven through all 10 Canadian provinces. In the US we’ve driven to Florida, Yellowstone, and done Route 66 taking us through 40 of the 50 states. On our Newfoundland trip in 2018 it required an 8 hour ferry ride to get to the island so while not as elegant as a cruise ship, it shares many similarities and I think the seeds for an interest in trying a real cruise were planted there. In September 2019 after doing some brief research we booked our first cruise. We opted for NCL because the freestyle dining concept appealed to us and they had a Brazilian steakhouse and we love us some Brazilian steakhouse. We were going to be sailing on the Breakaway in October 2020. It turned out 2020 wasn’t going to be the best year to be booking a cruise for. So that didn’t happen and the replacement one we booked for 2021 didn’t happen so by the time the one in 2022 actually happened we had a lot of pent up cruise excitement, which apparently still hasn’t died off. Finally, up to talking about the cruise that this whole thread is supposed to be about(I warned you about long-winded, rambling story telling). Here’s a picture of the itinerary. We booked the cruise way back on December 30, 2022. Why pick this one? Here’s where the rambling backstory becomes relevant. Yes the Breakaway will seem very familiar after having already sailed on the Getaway and Escape but the Breakaway was supposed to be our first so we wanted to finally get on board. New Orleans instead of New York? From our road trip past a 2000 km, 18 hour drive each way seemed very reasonable and a little on the short side so driving was easily doable. On the drive there were would pass through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana which are 5 of the 10 states we’ve yet to have driven through. On the way home we’ll go a couple hours out of our way to go through Arkansas to add a 6th new state because that seems more reasonable than having to plan some future trip specifically to Arkansas since that would be the only state down there we hadn’t seen. Overall this seemed like a great way to combine cruising and road tripping into one holiday. Why this particular itinerary? It’s about the only thing they sail out of New Orleans and my wife wants to hug a sloth and swim with a manatee. I think that covers most of what I planned to cover in this initial opening post. I’d expect most of the rest of them to be slightly shorter. Since it’s 19 days until embarkation day and 16 until we hit the road I’ll add some more info over the next two weeks. So what do I plan to post about from here? I expect most of the people who read these are experienced cruisers but in case there’s anyone who’s never cruised before or never cruised NCL before I’ll probably go over some of the basic things that have already been done in the preparation stages. Excursions and plans for each port will be detailed. I’ll go over the planned three day trip to get there and two days to get home. Once the cruise actually starts I’ll plan to post at least once, hopefully twice per day with what’s going on. There’ll be food and menu pictures. Empty ship at 5am pictures. Excursion pictures. Almost certainly pictures of nothing but water. I doubt we’ll be doing any of the shows, so don’t expect that. I’m extremely introverted and don’t really like people so there will likely be tips and tricks for where to go and what to do in an effort to not interact with anyone else on board. Freestyle daily pictures can be posted as well. I’ll do my best to answer and questions or fulfill any requests anyone has as long as they don’t require me to have to talk to someone. Well that should be enough for now. I’ll give everyone a couple of days to finish reading this post before I make my second post.

Speaking of the Aqua it was about half way through this cruise when my mom decided she’d like to do another cruise to Bermuda in the not-too-distant future. I mentioned they usually have sailings from both NYC and Boston each year so she was intrigued by Boston since she’s never been there before. So I spent an hour or so on the ships wi-fi doing a search for future Bermuda cruises that would have taken a minute or two on any other internet connection that has existed in the last 80 years. There is a Boston-Bar Harbour-Bermuda cruise on the Gem the end of October 2025. She immediately decided we should do that one. I told her we should at least wait until we get home so we can see the price in CAD$ instead of the useless to us USD$. Then a day or two later I was looking again and saw they had 2026 cruises available which were new so I searched again to see if there were other options. It now had the September 2025 NYC-Bermuda cruises on the Aqua, which I was unaware was the new ship until that exact moment. So I mentioned that the identical itinerary to this one was now available in two years on what will be a brand new ship which we know almost no details of except that it has some sort of roller coaster/waterslide she’ll have no interest in trying. She decided Boston was still more interesting to her. Once we got back into Canada yesterday I priced the two options and of course the Gem out of Boston was cheaper, so she said cheaper is better but both are kind of pricey as they’re substantially more than this one was. I reminded her that we wouldn’t be booking this for at least two or three more weeks or perhaps months from now, so she has plenty of time to think about it although prices will probably change by then. I just got off the phone with her a few minutes ago because she thought she’d call me to let me know that she’d been thinking about it and going on a brand new ship sounds like fun, so now she thinks she’d rather do the Aqua cruise. I reminded her that we wouldn’t be booking this for at least two or three more weeks or perhaps months from now, so she has plenty of time to think about it. So very long story short, it seems nearly certain at this point that we’ll be booking a sailing on the Aqua back to Bermuda sometime in the very near future.

Thank you for not hiding it in the curve of the handrail on the staircases. I guess people who use the elevator think it’s a good hiding place but as someone who only uses the stairs there was a point where it felt like every time I was going up the stairs I’d find a duck.

If you hid that cruise duck in a hole in the back of one of those light thingies on the Waterfront, I’m the one that found it when I was out walking the following morning at 5:30 or so. We were going to hide it again but a little girl walked by and was glad to take it off our hands with a big smile on her face.