Honolulu Blue

I already do look back at those times as the best. I sailed on the Summit in September '21 along with about 320 other passengers. Heavenly. 😇 I sailed on a Princess a couple of months later with under 1000 passengers. That was pretty blissful too, though that ship had some pinch points. I blundered onto a Millie sailing out of San Juan in November that was about half full. That was also pretty nice.

Do Carnival ships still have entertainment directors (EDs) and are they still listed in whatever passes for the Fun Times these days? I remember part of the reason that EDs were split from CDs is that the ships were getting bigger with more to do, and so there was a need for more scheduling and other items behind the scenes. This was another place to stash CDs who were burning out from being Carnival's face of FUN on their ships. As for executive status, I've always thought of Mr. Heald in his current status as a "beard" - even though he doesn't think he is. He meets with other beards all the time (in person and virtually), including the queen bearded lady. He occasionally visits ships under construction, a very beard-y thing to do. He gets inside information (sometimes) from the PR department and the other beards. When he visits ships to do his thing, he stays in guest accommodations and not crew quarters. And I bet he gets paid more than any CD in the fleet, and very likely more than Chris & Mike. If not, then he's underpaid, IMHO.

I have one question for @CCAubs: Do you know if Mr. Sommer will take the place of Mr. Del Rio at this seminar? There are arguments both ways, but it's nice to have a definitive answer. The questions that I have for Mr. Del Rio (which I asked in a different thread) can be transferred to Mr. Sommer.

Not if it's inside a retirement account like my CCL shares are. I don't think of my shares as an investment. I think of them as a bond or a preferred stock with an occasional nontaxable dividend and a possible equity kicker.

There are several other embarkation ports that you didn't list between Galveston and Ft. Lauderdale, namely: New Orleans Tampa Miami Port Canaveral (sort of near Orlando) It's OK not to toss them for whatever reason, but you really should put them on your initial list. Beyond that, I don't have much to say but have fun planning and have fun cruising!

All right, I accept your challenge. Please list for me at least 20 reasons why one should not ever cruise in Florida or the Caribbean. You don't have to post it here, but kindly link your list wherever you decide to put it. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom.

Here's Verizon's cell coverage map zoomed in on Alaska. I found it at Verizon Coverage Map: Nationwide 5G and 4G LTE Network Cell Phone Coverage | Verizon : My knowledge of Alaskan geography is limited, but there seem to be splotches of orange in the places you're likely to end up. YMMV.

Two instant thoughts when I saw this: Chaperoning 100 teen girls - you poor thing! 🤣 100 teen girls - where do I sign up? 😈

Thank you for sharing your story and that of your waiter friend. The full charter I was recently on... well, I guess we're kind of a cult. We had our own dress code (different on different nights) and brought along almost all of our entertainment. Our group drank a lot of alcohol, which I'm sure the cruise line was grateful for. I'd say we played well with each other, but as for whether we played well with others? You decide. I think these guys kind of liked us:

I found an interesting article from Brittany Chang of Business Insider about themed cruises and the charter cruise business. Several charters from Sixthman and ECP are mentioned by name (including The 80s Cruise). A Holland America rep was also quoted about their charter cruises. Notable by their absence was StarVista Live (though HAL does some SVL charters). TL,DR - the charter business is growing like a weed. The article is at https://www.businessinsider.com/theme-cruise-star-trek-edm-rising-popularity-2023-3 ,

Of limited relevance to the OP, but I sailed on the previous edition of HAL's Rotterdam (#6, IIRC) in 2019. It had a boring 7-day Caribbean itinerary that I'd done on Carnival and other cruise lines several times, but with a couple of twists: 1) This one went to Santo Tomas de Castilla, Guatemala's Caribbean port. It mostly serves Guatemala's navy on that side of the world, but the pier was long enough for us to dock, so we did. 2) It DID NOT go to Cozumel. I thought that was a neat trick. You try finding a 7-day cruise to the Western Caribbean that doesn't go there. It was the smallest ship I had been on at the time in terms of passengers (about 1600) and size. I don't remember a lot about the experience, which must have meant that things went pretty well. My favorite souvenir from this cruise was this freebie: To summarize, I had a decent time on HAL, but I'm not hurrying back.

To provide a counterpoint, I was on the Celebrity Summit for 5 days in February and March and their dinner buffet was more or less as it always had been - full selection, no closed stations, good and tasty food (I'm the wrong person to ask about quality). The fact that it was a charter may have had something to do with it. Or perhaps all the protests to their President's office finally wore them down and they did the right thing in response.

Thanks everyone for sharing. I found a nice article about how writer Ashley Kosciolek got stuck with a charter cruise that wasn't the team she was a fan of. You can read about it at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/nfl-cruise-charter/ .

Ashley Kosciolek (one of my favorite cruise travel writers) happened to get stuck on a partial charter for Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans. She's not a Bucs fan. Hilarity ensues. She writes about her experience at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/nfl-cruise-charter/ . The article is titled "Fumble! I accidentally booked an NFL cruise — for a team I don't even like". I wish I could write a good TL,DR for this article, but I can't. Just read it. I promise it will be worth your time - especially if you're a partial or full charter cruise fan, or a Tampa fan.

I've been on Millie and the Summit since the restart and haven't seen bingo on either. Based on that and others who have posted in this thread, I don't see it coming back anytime soon on the Summit or any other Celebrity ship. If you really want to play bingo while you're cruising, you do have a couple of options that I can see: Bring your bingo equipment from home and call it for the friends you make before and/or during the cruise. It helps if you have a big cabin. If no money changes hands, you can try to find some empty or unused space to hold some games (I modestly suggest the OVC between lunch and dinner, though that's not the only suitable place). If money does change hands, you're going to have to be discreet, because the casino doesn't like competition. 😗 Get some Internet access and play it online. I'm sure you can find something suitable in whatever store your phone/tablet supports. It's best to download it before you get to the cruise ship.

I'm not quite to the point where you are, but I think I'm getting there. On my last two side-to-side cruises, I started out without any Internet access, but folded two days in on both. Life is just so much easier (for me anyway) when I have it. I should note that when I'm on the road in the U.S., I don't need WiFi as much because I have some data and that's usually faster than any WiFi I can get.

I think someone just leaked the name of Celebrity's latest ship! 😁

I don't have any answers for you (you've gotten better advice than I could give from others already), but I want to note that I'm happy that Celebrity is returning to sailing from sunny San Juan for the 2024-25 season. I was on the Millie in November and it was maybe half full. This made me happy, but probably not so much LLP and Jason L.

I was just on the Summit a couple of weeks ago. I spent very little time in the casino while it was open - none at the table games. Sorry. I was on the Millie in November. I got to the roulette once as the casino was opening. THe ship wasn't close to full. It had a $5 minimum. Good luck, have fun, play responsibly.

I'm sitting at the Long Beach airport. I've disembarked and the cruise is over. But I still have some notes about yesterday and today. So let's get to that. I got a cute faux license plate and some luggage tags as gifts. I did the charity walk for the Wounded Warrior fund and I got some more gifts for that. The big one was a t shirt: BTW, it was originally advertised as a mile walk. There's no way I was doing a 5k walk or run with the incentives they offered. Physically I could have probably done it, but there's always a risk there. The mile walk went reasonably well for me. I felt good for the most part and jogged the last half lap for the fun of it. My unofficial time was 15 minutes. It was 8 laps around a specific course on deck 12. There were a fair number of photos taken of my walk, so you might see me in a few months either in the highlight reel or the random photos that are made available after the cruise. If you look carefully at this picture, you can see people who took this a lot more seriously than I did. Later on we docked in Ensenada first few hours. I didn't get off the ship. Then, in the evening, was the Lou Gramm concert. I had been looking forward to this since he announced he was coming. I thought he did a good job and so did much of the audience. He played most of his big hits with Foreigner and a couple of solo songs. He also played some songs that weren't such big hits for Foreigner. The one big absence from the set list was "Waiting For a Girl Like You". That was a very big hit back in 1981-82, but it was a ballad. I inferred from his autobiography that he wasn't a big fan of Foreigner's ballads and that he was a rock and roller at heart. So its absence wasn't a complete surprise. But it raised my eyebrows. There may have been some other reason for skipping it - perhaps as simple as he's played it a million times and didn't want to play it that day. My guess is Foreigner will not miss playing it at next year's Rock and Romance cruise. @George Cwill have to confirm this if I don't make it. BTW, most of the VJs and interviewers stopped by to introduce him. I was reminded of an old joke about light bulbs. After the concert I had dinner and went to sleep. I had a long day ahead that would start early. I went to breakfast in the Jammer right at 6, as it was opening. I ate, then finished packing. There were some challenges, but I took everything I wanted to take. I started the long walk to disembark about 7:30 and made it outside by 8. I like that my pretty face keeps getting me back on shore with minimum hassle. I ordered another Lyft and made it to LGB by 8:40. It was $48 for this ride. That's all that I currently have to say about this trip and The 80s Cruise. It was a wonderful time and I'm already looking forward to next year's edition. Truly I'd rather think about that than thinking about all the stuff that I have to take care of both in my personal and work life. 🤪 Thanks for reading.

I'll hold you to that! 🤑😎 If I book, I'll give you a gratis tour of my solo interior cabin down in steerage if you want. 🐁🐀 It'll take about 10 seconds.

Awesome! I'm monitoring this too. My booking window comes just before the general public in a few weeks. I'm uncertain if I can make all the pieces work, but I'd like to. The current lineup sounds good to me already.

A couple of notices I found while flipping through the app. The first doesn't affect this cruise, but I do have a cruise that stops in Colon, Panama next year. This second one I'm sure most of you have heard about. I didn't see anyone smoke or try to smoke in public while I was out and about in that country. I have several more stops in Mexico on cruises over the next year. We'll see how it goes.

Thank you for sharing. I love my share of sugary snacks, but these calorie bombs are not for me. I gained two pounds just looking at the pictures. 😮

Today we continue on our way to Ensenada. We're a few hours away. Now it's time for me to chronicle what happened yesterday. I skipped out on the Autograph Q and A session to stand in line for Lou Gramm's autograph. And quite a line it was. It moved and I eventually got my signature. His siggy is actually clearer than mine, and I'm sure he's done many more than I have. I bought a t shirt because I didn't really have anything suitable for him to sign. Mr. Gramm is a very nice man. He was nice to me and nice to others I overheard in line. BTW, no pictures were allowed anywhere in the autograph area. It was held on deck 5 in the MDR. As for Vixen and Lori Majewski, well, they weren't Maytag repairmen lonely, but their lines were a lot shorter. I wasn't interested in their autographs. Living Colour had an autograph session in a different location that was so last minute that it wasn't even on the newsletter. JT had to announce it. After doing that, I had some time to watch the nearby auction. I saw auctions for paintings of famous album covers for Guns and Roses, the J. Geils Band, and Duran Duran. This latter painting sparked some lively bidding between two people. One surrendered to the other after a bid of $3300. Far too rich for my blood, but I don't judge others on what they decide to do for fun. Later on I went to the Lou Gramm Q and A session. It was held in their smallest theater and it was PACKED. I got there 10 minutes early and I could barely find a seat. It was standing room only by the time things started. Mark Goodman hosted and put poor Mr. Gramm on the defensive right away with a discussion about the Foreigner that's on their farewell tour with no original members left. Then he kept up the pressure by talking about Mick Jones, his former writing partner and Foreigner bandmate. On Mr. Jones, I have some bad news. They haven't talked to each other in a decade. His desire to talk to him ever again is weak. Even Mick's manager is discouraging contact, so a reunion of any kind is unlikely. He also didn't think much of the idea of joining the current Foreigner in any capacity - as a guest or anything more permanent. In more positive news, we should have some new Lou Gramm songs released this year. Most were based on solo material that was shelved for various reasons back in the 80s and 90s. This Q and A was very informative and I'm glad I went. I didn't do anything else if note yesterday. No concerts for the first time since I left town! Can you believe it? Today I definitely have a concert. Guess who I'm going to see? 🤩