eileeshb

Bonaire is the prime snorkelling spot on that itinerary, I did the double dip excursion to kleine Bonaire and a diver on my sailing told me he had done some snorkelling right beside the port which he said was excellent. The water certainly looked crystal clear from the ship but I didn’t have time to investigate after my excursion as I wanted to dry off and change before going looking for souvenirs. There was next to nothing by way of retail outlets by the pier when I was there in March, one souvenir shop and a diamonds international outlet.

They did change the source of the water here because the original source was prone to farmland run-off pollution which left us with near permanent boil notices for consumption. Remember places like Ireland have very old infrastructure, and only switched to a national-level agency with responsibility for the entire system about 10 years ago when they tried to introduce water charges for households. Ireland keeps getting censured by the EU authorities for the state of our water and waste water treatment systems. I remember one incident when I was a teenager that whomever was responsible for doing maintenance on the water treatment just dumped a pile of Aluminium on the shore of the reservoir and it all got washed into the reservoir which resulted in a do not use notice for everyone served by that reservoir. The waste water/sewage in my home village got pumped directly into the sea without any treatment, they’ve just finished building a brand new treatment plant down the hill behind my parents house but are still waiting for the official license from the environmental protection agency to start using it.

If you decide to upgrade to one of the unlimited plans they take the cost value of your “free” minutes and offset it against the normal cost of the unlimited package. you can not do the discounted upgrade once you start using your minutes.

There’s US pre-clearance at the main Irish airports and the Airline I’m looking at will check through to Alaska or JetBlue no problem.

the roll calls are definitely a lot quieter these days. I set up the roll call for my cruise in october and so far only 2 others have joined, I also setup the group on the other site and have a half dozen or so on it. It's still a long way out and it's an alaskan cruise very late in the season so I suspect it won't be super busy on either forum.

I've travelled solo for work and leisure for 20 years at this stage, it was worse in the early days as I look young for my age so I'd people thinking I was a teenager right through to my early 30s. Definitely the worst aspect of travelling solo is having to drag everything with you when you need to go to the restroom or even just look around shops in the airport. 4 wheel luggage is a lifesaver in that regard for me, I've a 4 wheel carry on and a 4 wheel checked bag so it's much easier to move around with them than even the 2 wheel versions. I usually also have a backpack or tote for the stuff I want access to during the flight and on the return trip have a second checked bag that I can balance on top of the 4 wheeler when going to the airport. I do bring a kindle with me when going to meals solo, all my cruises to-date have been with NCL so I usually eat dinner with the solos organised by the solos host or even just with one or two other solos who don't want to wait around for the big group. I tend towards the buffet for breakfast and lunch mostly cos I can't hack the waiting around for service in the MDRs at those times. I had a few folks from my roll call spot me in the MDR at lunch on embarkation because I was wearing an irish sports team top and they'd seen my posts, pure fluke I was shown to a table right next to them. Embarkation day is usually the only time I eat lunch in the MDR.

My local water supply has such high chlorine content some of the blondes find their hair going green. The local hair salons have to add filter heads to their basins. We also have ridiculously high limescale levels.

Yeah the standard response you get on here if you mention feet swelling is either 1. Too much salt in the food (I can taste salt if it’s ott) or 2. You’re not used to being at sea level (I work in a building that gets hit by the waves on a regular basis, there was seaweed on the windscreen of my car after work a couple of days ago) (my mechanic hates my car) then I came across a medical article about some people developing swollen feet due to the process used in purifying the water for drinking on the ships. So diuretic tablets for all future cruises as that water is obviously used for the ice and cooking aboard and try to avoid it otherwise.

There is a restaurant in the old city on Calle Fortaleza that will hold bags, I think the name is barrachina or something like that. I know some of the excursion providers will *not* take bags due to concern about vehicles getting broken into. I did a morning old city tour pre cruise and then went to look at the forts myself post cruise to do more photography.

Okay.. I just looked at the maps again and it looks like terminal b and c are walkway connected so as long as I don’t have to go through security the transit time should be fine.

Hmm i just checked Wikipedia and it seems there were/are plans for a bunch of other European airports to have pre-clearance but none are up and running yet. I know there are some flights from other foreign airports that route via Shannon just to do the pre-clearance at the moment.

There can be a variety of reasons you’re not seeing more options 1. Contracts with providers aren’t locked in 2. Excursion is sold out 3. You’ve already booked something in the port that clashes with other potential excursions. 4. There’s been sufficient complaints about an excursion to cause it to be pulled since the pandemic the hospitality businesses around the world have been struggling for both liquidity and staff. I’ve been looking into excursions for Alaska and noticed one incredibly popular excursion wasn’t offered at all last year as the business couldn’t get enough staff to accommodate cruise guests throughout the season. I was shocked to see a cruise ship to come into my home village, it was a national geographic ship with only about a hundred guests and had to use RIBs to get to shore as the local pier is only accessible at high tide for anything bigger. But it’s also the closest pier to the #2 tourist attraction in Ireland.

Some of us have weird immune systems that can’t tolerate substantial quantities of the water produced on the ship. And I do bring a refillable bottle with me. Also there’s no bottle filling stations onboard so you have to use multiple cups to pour the water into your bottle, yep you can’t use a single cup to fill the bottle you are supposed to use as many cups as it takes to fill the bottle. And no you can’t just stick the bottle under the tap in the buffet.

So in your experience there should be major incidents on every cruise ship with teens aboard sailing European itineraries … there aren’t. In *my* experience “mature” men are by far the most likely to be aggressive, stupid obnoxious drunks compared to their younger counterparts and I’ve seen plenty of both. I work in a shop in a tourist town, in 2019 the local golf club hosted a major tournament and we had to close early every day due to the supposedly mature men coming in with their drinks in hand and then getting irate if we asked them not to spill them all over the apparel.

You do realise that most of them are drinking long before they turn 21, right? The USA is an outlier in having alcohol restrictions to 21, most other countries with a formal restriction have age 18 and others have none at all. The USA students that I met on study abroad in Ireland were usually u21 and enjoying legal access to alcohol while they were here. The really smart ones would time their semester abroad so that they’d either turn 21 here or shortly after they got home. In my experience the young people who abused alcohol the most tended to be from families that were extremely restrictive in allowing them to drink. I was still u18 starting college and the only thing my parents asked me to avoid drinking was cocktails.

I work in a surf shop in Ireland so no holidays June to September and my mum booked her holiday for May this year which leaves me with October. I usually cruise in late February but that is obviously not an option for Alaska.

It's over 20 years since I last flew through Logan airport so I'm not sure what the transit time between terminals is these days. I've a flight option that says 1h30 layover and it will likely be Terminal C to Terminal B during that time. I'd be flying in from Ireland with Aer Lingus (US pre-clearance so no customs) and would be connecting to Alaska to continue on to Seattle in October. Looking at the airport map it looks like facilities/services in the airport after security have vastly improved from my last transit through there but I've no clue how long I should allow for transiting between terminals. If this was London Heathrow then 90 minutes would be the bare minimum needed.

this sounds like an insane IT meltdown. I used to work in IT as did my late father. He actually installed and maintained the 90s generation (upgrade to avoid Y2K) of the air traffic control system at our local airport. I then worked at an Intel site next door to the air traffic controller's training HQ for Ireland. I've seen a few of the airline and airport IT breakdowns over here over the years. Local radar station in the west of Ireland goes down = all north atlantic flights have to be re-routed, south of england radar station goes down = no flights crossing british airspace, network card connection ATC dublin to radar goes down = Dublin airport closes, then there was the British Airways HQ IT meltdown in 2017 the day I was flying home from Miami that one had the check-in desk people taking 30mins+ to move passengers to alternative flights because they could only intermittently get peoples booking info and then gave up on trying to print new details and had to hand write them for us to bring to the other airlines. I think it took something like a week for BA to catchup on the impacts of their IT meltdown, the network card in dublin took a couple of days to identify as the point of failure. Thankfully the radar station failures usually only lasted a few hours.

Yep I transited through Newark between Costa Rica and Ireland so I had to collect my bags and walk them through customs before putting handing them back over to the airline desk. However if flying via Ireland both Dublin and Shannon have US pre-clearance facility so arrivals from there into the US are treated as domestic arrivals. I think there may be one or two other European airports with that facility now too. I used to travel from Shannon to Arizona regularly in my previous job and on a couple of occasions I got off the plane in Newark and literally walked to the gate directly opposite my arrival gate to get onto the flight to Arizona.

thank you ! I hadn't seen any mentions on the forums but wanted to be reassured 😀

That is great info. One of my American cousins is a pilot with Frontier and is being used in their current recruitment ads. I’ve never dealt with Alaska air as a connecting airline before, my only previous trip to the Pacific Northwest was with united on a work trip. I was concerned about the weather as I’m expecting it to be similar to the west coast of Ireland which can have heavy seas and wind blow up at any time.

Normally I’m not one for running risks with my flight planning but travelling between the west coast of Ireland and Seattle at a time when flight options are reducing is making me consider a noon flight departing Seattle. my cruise finishes Oct 21st, so I’m partly concerned that there could be potential for weather delays getting back to Seattle and then secondly the potential check-in/tsa effects at the airport as I’ll be an international traveller. right now the cheapest flight options involve Alaska Air which seems to have truly awful reviews, so when avoiding them the next cheapest is a noon flight from Seattle to Boston that will connect to the Irish flight. Otherwise it’s a red-eye near midnight and a 10hr wait in Boston before getting the flight back to Ireland. The other alternative is stay in Seattle overnight in the 21st and fly home on the 22nd. Btw none of the airlines that look viable are part of the port valet program, plus the FAQ for that program doesn’t include info for international travellers and I’ve only once been allowed to do curbside bag drop in over 20 visits to the USA which makes me doubt it will be available even if I did use one of the airlines participating in the program. anyone have any insights on potential delays?

slightly off topic but if you bring the boots to NZ make sure they're easily accessible when going through border control as they will want to take them for sanitizing in case you've any seeds or anything stuck in the tread.

I think there's at least one independent company that links the railway with a bike tour, i.e. go up on the train but bike back to Skagway. It's not offered by NCL but I'm not sure about other cruiselines. I found it on alaska shore tours... I'm considering it as I don't want to wind up doing too many excursions where I'll just be sitting/standing. Anyhow it would cover the MUST DO railway combined with a wee bit more action via a 15 mile downhill bike ride.

If it’s only a couple of cent/dollars it’s probably just an exchange rate rounding error. I’ve seen it pop up a couple of times on my bookings it usually disappears again.