brookie848

I hope she can make it! Just a question, though. Is she already on your reservation? We always make sure a potential extra person is on our initial reservation just to ensure them a life boat spot.

Why not the Viva out of San Juan? This is now our preferred port. Like you, I'm curious to try out the new ship. Even though we have no sea days, we only plan on getting off the ship in three ports. The other three days we plan on exploring the ship and relaxing on what will hopefully be a not-too-crowded Haven sundeck.

From what I'm reading, it seems your father is going to clinic for dialysis. Is there a reason why hemo was chosen as opposed to peritoneal? If he could switch over, that would be much better. My husband did dialysis on one trip and was scheduled to do it on a second when we got a call about his transplant. Arranging for dialysis on board was a bit of a pain, but overall everything worked out smoothly. Has he looked into doing hemo dialysis at home? Definitely search the disabled cruising board. I remember reading a post about someone who had arranged for dialysis at different clinics on their trip in the Caribbean. As @ontheweb mentioned, be aware that there is always a chance that your itinerary might change. Good luck planning the trip!

Thank you! I searched for baggage service, but it came to a different page. This is definitely helpful.

I've thought about this, but we tend to freak out a bit and what to be in our departure city the day before -- even if it is only a couple of hours away. I will check to see if they offer one-way trips for the day of debarkation or just see if this is something we are willing to let go and do. We've taken a trip with Yankee Trails before and it was okay.

According to the website, most trains from ALB to NYC don't offer luggage service. The only one that does is Lake Shore Limited.

We live in Albany, NY and are considering taking Amtrak to either NYC or Boston to cruise. Our issue is luggage -- most trains (especially to NYC) don't offer luggage service. Are we just out of luck or severely limited in what will work for us? For those of you who have checked baggage on Amtrak, did it work well for you? Unfortunately, a single carry-on is not possible for us -- we have some medical things that take up space. We are also interested in any good suggestions for hotels out of the cities where we could park our car and then get to the port via another method. There don't seem to be many good options for Boston -- I wasn't sure about hotels in New Jersey for the NYC port. We would be cruising NCL, so it would be the port in the city proper. Thanks!

Actually, miniature horses and dogs are the only actual licensed service animals.

If we've had a great server, we've requested to have the same server on other nights and most times we've been accommodated.

So...how's the Viva Haven?

Yes...it's in the Haven. One of the many reasons why Epic's Haven is one of the best in the fleet.

I believe it's technically called the Courtyard Grille. We spent several afternoons there on our last cruise eating snacks (otherwise known as "second lunch") when we got back from excursions.

Our tradition is to sail out of San Juan in February. It's interesting to see that the Epic is heading back there. The itinerary is pretty basic, but it does include Antigua. Plus, we love the Epic's Haven.

I vote for no smells. 😁 And it's been legal here in NY for a while. I'm still getting used to the skunk smell.

And let's be honest...the real concern here is fire. I think anyone who smokes on the balcony should be forced to read/watch about the Princess ship where someone died because a passenger was smoking on their balcony.

Back in 2017 we sailed on the NCL Dawn out of San Juan. This was in November, and if you remember that year, it was the year with the horrible hurricanes. We were the first NCL cruise out of Puerto Rico (we had to sail-in the day of the cruise because there were no/few hotels available for tourists) and everything was being run by generators. While we were at the airport, we got a change itinerary notification that we would be stopping in St. Thomas -- they had just opened the port back up. When we stopped at St. Thomas a week later, we had crappy weather, but our goal was to go spend money to help the people living there out. So we went into town and proceeded to do just that and this is where we ate. We had great food. I see the chocolate shop is still across the alley. My husband bought a bunch of things for his co-workers there.

BWI also has them. They are in the walkway to the B gates. I'm enjoying your report!

We've found those tags stuck to things a year later. Some of them are stubborn.

So glad I read this! It is going into my memory bank for our upcoming trip. Thanks for the information.

And honestly, if they left because they couldn't handle being at sea, the chances of them returning for another cruise are pretty slim. So NCL doesn't have a huge incentive to bend over backwards for them.

From what I can tell, the balconies are the same size with a few exceptions. Cabins 15318 and 15918 seem to be the bigger, angled balconies. We were able to snag one of these for our 2025 cruise. Be careful with the 300/900 cabins. Those will likely have some interference from the slides.

So glad you are traveling (or soon will be) over the Atlantic. And rum helps with most anything.

Definitely looking forward to this! We sail on the Viva in February.

Yes. The 2024 cruise won't be too bad -- we're only getting off in Tortola, St. Maarten and Antigua. The 2025 will be a bit more tricky -- more ports that we might want to visit or we haven't been to as many times (Dominican Republic, Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao). Decisions will need to be made.

Thanks for the suggestion, but the heating pad is not needed at this time. It was originally needed to warm up dialysis fluid. We ended up just putting the bags of fluid on the floor in front of the windows (we had a forward-facing cabin) and that ended up working quite well for us.