Live – Rotterdam, Prinsendam, Queen Mary II

[DeepWaterMariner]

Very engaging discription of a unique journey. Well done!

[kazu]

Roy, thank you so much for the time and effort to share with us this wonderful adventure. Your posts were absolutely fabulous and your blog fantastic.

 

To close with my parting shot - I'll miss cruising with you:)

[RuthC]

Thank you for a most enjoyable ride along with you. I could picture every discription of the first two ships, and just relaxed while you discribed the final ship. At least I could picture the seas and the fog! I have been well-acquainted with them.

Welcome home. I can not wait for your next reports.

[erewhon]

Thank you for all the reports of your cruises.

Have really enjoyed travelling along with you.

Again Thank you.

[Flyingfish]

Thanks Roy, it was indeed a pleasure to sail with you!

[ironin]

Welcome Home, Roy!

 

Thanks so much for sharing all your great reports, and blog photos with all of us here.

[arzz]

Thank you so much for taking me with you on your epic adventure. Next to actually being on board myself blogs like yours are the best!

[LostwithoutPockets]

Welcome home, and thanks for posting! I looked forward to reading about your experiences every day!

[rafinmd]

Well, I arrived home at 9:15 to no chocolates on the bed and a very long patch of grass in the back yard, not to mention a lot of grocery shopping.

 

RuthC, my next trip will be in October. I expect to be posting that on the Crystal forum but will leave a link to it here when the time comes. My next time on HAL will be the Zaandam in February, Singapore to Hong Kong.

 

Ironin, thanks and the Scan Snap was a real gem. I came home with about 4 pounds less paper than I would normally have. There was one thing I couldn't do on it. The deck plan given out for the SS Rotterdam came with a heavy cardboard backing and needed to go on a flatbed scanner. The plan includes museum areas which were not shown to passengers when the ship was active (such as the engine room and bridge). It is now posted on the ships section of the blog, or here's a direct link"

 

http://arctictriple.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/hotelrdeckplan.pdf

 

One little sidelight. On each of my 3 voyages I used an internet package of 4 hours plus and managed to get the blog, cruise critic, personal email, and some other internet stuff done. The morning I disembarked the Prinsendam, I started the day with 31 of my 270 minutes left. I think I went wild and used 28 minutes that last morning.

 

At some time I hope to post an entry of some type on getting a blog and/or live report to work reasonably well when working with satellite internet.

 

Roy

 

Again, thanks for all your kind words.

[Love Cruises]

Welcome home Roy and thanks for your exceptional blog. I enjoyed reading about all your adventures and l learn so much from your history notes about your stops. Thanks so much for sharing with all your Cruise Critic friends.

 

Looking forward to your blog on the Grande Caribe!!!!

 

Your cruising friends - the Cruise-a-holics,

 

Barbara and Dan

[rafinmd]

Thank you Barbara and Dan. I'm posting the following on the HAL, Cunard, and Crystal forums.

 

In the past year I have done "Live" threads and also blogs using several cruise lines, primarily Crystal, Cunard, and HAL but to some extent also Windstar, Royal Caribbean, Cruise West(RIP), Blount Small Ship Adventures, and various ferries. I thought I'd share my experiences on how I did it without breaking the bank on internet fees.

 

I'll start with the selection of a blog site. While there may be more I am aware of 3 and have used them all at some point or other:

 

http://www.travelpod.com

http://www.blogger.com

http://www.wordpress.com

 

Examples of my blogs from these sites are:

 

Travelpod: http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog/rafinmd/1/tpod.html

Blogger: http://baltoenchantment.blogspot.com/

Wordpress: http://arctictriple.wordpress.com/

 

All three of these allow you to post to the blog via email, which is a great timesaver. My current favorite is wordpress which allows mailing to the site as a bcc. I like this because I also send the posts to some family in the same email and prefer to keep the blog address private. Blogger also allows this while travelpod will only recognize emails sent to them as a “To:”. I also like the wordpress option to set up tabs for special pages for documents like daily programs, menus, deck plans and the like.

 

The first site I used was travelpod. I've mostly moved away from it but still plan to use it at times. It stores all reports under an individual's username with separate sections for each trip and I will likely use it for shorter trips that don't merit a separate site. One annoying feature it has is that it wants you to associate each post with a city, a bit awkward for a string of several days at sea.

 

I do all my writing offline and try to really minimize my satellite time. I generally post once per day, completing a day's entry either at bedtime or first thing in the morning and go online early in the morning. For the blogs my goal is to set everything on my SMTP mail account so all I need to do is click "send" when I go online. This works "out of the box" on Crystal. On HAL it did not, but there were instructions in the internet setup sheet on what to do. I consider myself relatively computer savy but it still took help from the Rotterdam internet manager to get it working. Cunard provides the same setup instructions as HAL, although it has worked for me without any special internet settings. The only line where I'm sure SMTP hasn't worked for me is Windstar.

 

 

Before posting photographs I reduce the resolution. “Image resizer” is a free tool provided by Microsoft for Windows XP. It is easily found as a free third party download for Vista and Windows 7. It typically cuts the size of pictures by a factor of about 7 meaning I can load 7 pictures in the time it would take for one without this adjustment.

 

Photographs can be sent as attachments to the email. I have found with wordpress that I can also send things like daily programs and menus via email much quicker than I can manually upload them. Whether uploading manually or by email I will put the code for accessing these files into place ahead of time so that when the file is on the site it will immediately be accessible to readers in the expected place.

 

I subscribe to the “live” threads by SMTP email. That way I get reader comments as an email and can view them offline and respond the next time I log in using very little satellite time.

 

For things like menus and daily program(me)s I have a new Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which has been a real godsend. It weighs only 12 ounces and on my last trip I left about 4 pounds of stuff I would normally carry home in the recycling bins along the way. The only thing I wanted to scan and was unable to was an SS Rotterdam deck plan with a heavy cardboard backing which required a flat bed scanner. Everything else worked fine, including a couple of commemorative 11x17 menus that folded over and went through in 2 passes. The results and ease of use were great.

 

I did occasionally find internet cafes enroute particularly for uploading menus and daily programs, but did most of my posting from the ships. On each of the ships on my last trip I used a single package of 260/270 minutes for the duration of the voyage, including my cruise critic activity, blog, and personal internet needs. On the Prinsendam, the longest of my voyages, I had about 30 minutes of that package left when I arrived day 19 in Edinburgh.

 

Roy

[rafinmd]

In case anyone is interested, I'm leaving tomorrow for a pair of cruises:

 

Blount Small Ship Adventures Grande Mariner and Grande Caribe NY to Montreal

Crystal Symphony back to New York

 

I'll be reporting on this on the Crystal forum at:

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1490256

 

and also with pictures at

 

http://yulcircle.wordpress.com

 

My next HAL voyage will be the Zaandam on February 5.

 

Roy

[RuthC]

In case anyone is interested, I'm leaving tomorrow for a pair of cruises:

 

Blount Small Ship Adventures Grande Mariner and Grande Caribe NY to Montreal

Thanks for the heads up! I'm very interested in reading about a Blount cruise. They're a local company I would love to be able to sail. Alas, the per diems are out of my league.

Still, I want to know what I am missing.

[Love Cruises]

In case anyone is interested, I'm leaving tomorrow for a pair of cruises:

 

Blount Small Ship Adventures Grande Mariner and Grande Caribe NY to Montreal

Crystal Symphony back to New York

 

I'll be reporting on this on the Crystal forum at:

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1490256

 

and also with pictures at

 

http://yulcircle.wordpress.com

 

My next HAL voyage will be the Zaandam on February 5.

 

Roy

Roy,

 

Are you cruising on the Grande Caribe or Grande Mariner?

 

If Will, Little Jen or Michelle are the stewards on board or if Jennifer McDaniels is the cruise director or John, the Capt., give them all a big "HELLO" from us.

 

 

Barbara and Dan

[rafinmd]

My sense was that the Prinsendam didn't so much "ride" the waves as it cut through them. I thought it was a smooth riding ship.

 

Sorry to be resurrecting an old thread, but this comment has always puzzled me a bit. Today I ran across this video on the Cunard forum, and it seems to shed some light on the subject.

 

 

Would you guess that perhaps the shape of the Prinsendam has something to do with the way it tackles heavy seas?

 

Warning, the video cuts into a lot of advertising after Captain Wells' comments.

 

Roy