pretzlaff

Bonsai-- I love your fridge.

Just a quick note on disembarking in Fort Lauderdale. The schedule showed 7am for self getting off. We got in line at 5:45. They started at 6:15. 5 minutes thru immigration. Many, many cabs waiting. Got to the Brightline train station in 15 minutes. Tickets in hand and in the waiting room at about 6:45. Good cruise.

I hate to take them off my bill entirely, but I might go to customer service and have them reduced back down to $16/ day.

On her now and still in the Med. I think we get to Florida on the 12th.

Another option is to chat folks up while you are waiting in line to get off and see who else is going to EWR. If they have limited luggage like you, then maybe the 4 of you can share one of the private taxi things at a total of $69.

No idea what a 'real' cab would cost if you called them. Hard to believe that you would save that much. No signs. I asked about 3 staff as I was headed that way.

We just did Cape Liberty to EWR yesterday getting off RC’s Jewel. We were “self assist”. Lined up at 7:15 for the scheduled 7:30 time, but only allowed to leave the boat about 7:45. Royal has a bus that has an 8:15 meet time in the theater. Given luggage and immigration, I suspect it left about 9am. Cost was $27/ person. It sold our 4 days before docking. We were on a 17 night transatlantic. I checked Uber in the morning and they were about $100. Taxis are funny. You leave the terminal out the North(?) door and take a left. Go across the street and into a chain link fence area. There are no “real” taxis that are yellow and say taxi. The coordinator offered us $69 for a private car or $22/ person in a 25-ish person shuttle. We took the shuttle. It took 15-20 minutes to load everyone. Cash or credit cards. The trip to EWR took about twice the time it should have at maybe 50 minutes. There was a detour because of traffic and dropping people off at a hotel first. Bad shuttle and bad roads. In retrospect, the extra $20 for a private car would have cut the wait and drive from over an hour to about 20 minutes. We will do that next time.

The fyords of Greenland really are the highlight of this transatlantic.

I am with Renee and Gumshoe currently on the 17 day Jewel. Quiet and boring can be a good thing. This is mixed with the occasional whale or iceberg sighting. We are headed into a large sound on the southern tip of Greenland today. You won’t find that on a four day cruise out of Florida.

We did both the Symphony and the Jewel transatlantic in the last 2 months. The internet was not good. There were parts of the ship that never had a signal. Then other parts like our cabin, it would come and go. Sooner or later, I would get tired of waiting for websites to load and simply give up. I was only browsing websites and not really demanding much. Frankly, it does not seem much better than before the new system. If you attempt to work, it will end poorly.

Things have improved this morning. I notice on speed test that we are now bouncing to a server in Madrid, no longer Miami. ping is 181, down is 9.00, up is 3.00.

We are on the Symphony now and about half way across the Atlantic. starlink is not good. Near Florida it seemed ok, but it is almost unusable now. speedtest says a latency of 179, download 0.38 (with dips to 0.00 during the test), and uploads of 2.86. It took 5 seconds to load cruisecritic after twice not finding the server. i was really looking forward to it, but at best it has only been as good as the old system and now seems worse.

We are four days into the east bound cruise, and will be with you on the west bound in October. We will probably get the package for the fall because the regular food has been disappointing so far on this cruise. Seems like poorer quality and lower cost ingredients to me. There are a ton of specialty places on board, so a UDP package would give many options. Also, while I hope it is different in the fall, this boat is packed and there are A LOT of kids. The Windjammer is particularly crowded and loud. The specialty places would be quieter.

The funny part is the 'take any test you want'....bring a picture, do whatever...no supervision....we trust you not to download a picture from the internet......this really isn't about health....this is really about theater....

We just got the Blue Chip veranda offer. I have about $800 from a future cruise credit. Can I use that for taxes? Can I use it for wifi? Do I do this before or after dealing with the Blue Chip rep. Do they set it all up, then you can add things like wifi, then can you call the regular Celebrity telephone rep, and pay everything off with the FCC?? I do love me some free cruises.