Beyondships

Super Shuttle gave me a quote today of $37 to go from POE to POM.

I stayed at Jury's Inn and at the Novotel earlier this year while I was gathering material for an article about Southampton. Both were clean and comfortable. The Novotel was doing some refurbishment, which should be finished by now.

The Novotel is situated along with the Ibsis and the Etap Hotel in a shopping area that is outside one of the gates to the City Cruise Terminal. It is possible to walk to the terminal although there is quite a bit of commercial traffic.

The Holiday Inn is just outside of the other gate to the City Terminal on the Mayflower Park side. (Somewhat confusingly, the Mayflower Terminal is not the terminal that is next to Mayflower Park). The Grand Harbour is across the road from the Holiday Inn.

In the old portion of the City are the Dolphin and the Star. The Dolphin was being refurbished last Spring. These are old coaching inns and have assocaitions with Jane Austen.

Jury's Inn and the Southampton Park Hotel are adjacent to one of the city's large parks. They are further away from the terminals but most people are going to want a taxi to take them (and their bags) to any of the terminals regardless of the location of the hotel they spend the night in.

Traffic in and around Southampton can get jammed up around embarkation time especially if there is a football match on or a sale at the Ikea. Thus, it is best to go over to the cruise terminal early.

I am not aware of any hotel that has a shuttle to the cruise terminals as in Fort Lauderdale or Miami. There is a free city bus that runs from the train station through the center of town to the Town Quay. From there it is still a long walk to any of the terminals and, as above, can be quite a lot of traffic in and around the docks.

Thank you for posting. I enjoyed seeing your photos.

I did the Chef's Table on Caribbean Princess last month and it was great. The tour of the galley was conducted by the Executive Chef (Antonio Cereda) and the Maitre d' Hotel (Angelo Balbiani) who are both very interesting and quite amusing. Then, the chef went off and prepared a series of special appetizers leaving us in the care of the Maitre d' and a waiter with bottles of good French bubbly. After that it was out to the Coral dining room where we had an excellent meal. It was a real highlight of the voyage.

I have posted photos of quite a few ships in port on my site.

http://www.beyondships.com/largecruisephotogallery.html,

http://www.beyondships.com/largecruisegallery2.html

http://www.beyondships.com/smallcruisephotogallery.html

There are also both interior and exterior photos of several more ships in the photo tours attached to what I call my cruise ship profiles. http://www.beyondships.com/cruiseships.html

I hope you enjoy.

Actually, it is a safety device. If you have to abondon ship and are stranded on an uninhabited island, you are supposed to dump out the contents, write a message, place it in the bottle and toss it into the sea. Just one taste will tell you that you are not supposed to drink the stuff.

In my interview with Henk Mensink, the Hotel Manager on Noordam, he said that what HAL is doing is not Anytime Dining but rather a program to introduce more flexibility into dining. I have posted the interview at http://beyondships.com/HAL-Nooordam-Mensink.html with some photos of Noordam at http://beyondships.com/Noordam.html

I hope this is helpful.