rafinmd is returning in stile from the Arctic

[Oahucruiser]

Can't wait for October and your next adventures. It'll be interesting to read about the Grand Caribe after all your time on larger ships!

[rafinmd]

I got home about 9:15, no chocolates on the pillow, and a long growth of grass in the back yard.

 

Trudi, Old Sea Dog and I will not quite meet. I believe they leave Montreal on September 24 and I follow about 3 weeks later on October 15.

 

Can't wait for October and your next adventures. It'll be interesting to read about the Grand Caribe after all your time on larger ships!

 

At least as of now I am planning to post that trip on the Crystal forum. The theme for that combination is "combining my 2 favorite cruise lines" but Blount is much too small to have a forum of it's own. So far the reaction there to my posting this way has been positive, but with that in mind it will be written with Crystal Cruisers as a target audience. I believe the 2 clientelle groups value many of the same things so it should work well with Cunarders. I'll post a link here when the time comes.

 

Roy

[fishywood]

Roy--was nice to have briefly chatted with you onboard. I have just now sufficiently recovered from flying home with a pounding head and sinuses (presumably courtesy of the man with the horrible bronchial cough in the row behind me at the Saturday 6PM planetarium show) to read through this thread. This will be a great help as I write my review as a first time Cunardier; hope to have it posted this weekend.

I had a similar experience--but a very different take--on the crowding that came out of the terrible weather on Thursday; I may just start a quick thread on that (and a couple other thoughts on the side) tomorrow. I do appreciate how infomative and unbiased your blog has been.

 

Charles

[rafinmd]

Thank you Charles. I've posted this on the Cunard, Crystal, and HAL forums. I'll also mention that on QM2 I was less efficient reporting since it was my first voyage in Platinum and I had a very generous 260 free minutes to work with.

 

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

[Thaxted]

Roy,

 

It's been a pleasure reading your account of the crossing that my wife and I enjoyed so much as well. One of our treats was meeting you on board, and now that we've caught the bug, I hope that we'll be seeing you on future voyages and perhaps even here on our Maryland home turf.

 

Best always,

 

John

 

.

[Artemis]

rafinmd, I join the chorus of thanks for sharing your day-by-day account of your crossing. It was a delight to follow. We disembarked July 27, so naturally, I battled the uncontrollable urge to check in on you daily...you know how painful withdrawal can be!

 

And thank you for the tech tips, too. :cool:

[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

 

I expect my next Cunard voyage to be the August 28 crossing

 

Roy

[rolfecms]

Just subscribed to this thread. Looking forward to reading your posts. Bon voyage!