ontheweb

And this can be especially true on a very port intensive cruise. And Hank, do they still have those BBC presentations. (DW like them. But they bored me to tears.)

Yes, what an awful direction the world is going on! Just recently learned that the local concert venue (Bethel Woods, the site of the original Woodstock concert in 1969) will no longer sell paper tickets, only text to your smartphone. 😢😢😢 I was told I should join the 21st century. I told the person (actually my son) who told me that that the concerts I attended last year were all 20th century (Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Willie Nelson with ZZ Top). A big 😁 for all those concerts and the original festival which I also attended. They also have a museum there that features both the original fest and the 1960s, and now they are rejecting the 20th century. How ironic!

Yes, please give updates, and hopefully none of the things you dread will happen, happen.

Just to confirm, this thread did originate on the Carnival board. It is easy to understand given the question it asked why the mods moved it from there to Ask a Cruise Question.

We did a land trip once that started with Paris. DW had printed out directions to our hotel. A direction was given. She was stumped. The sun was out and knowing it rose in the east, I was able to figure out which way whatever direction was that we had to go.

I can't disagree with that, but I was responding to your post which used the term "physically impossible".

There are people who want to cruise to Antarctica.

Well, I am almost always lost, and I am sure a smartphone would not help that. 😉 DW, OTOH, has an amazing sense of direction, and I just follow along. 😊 There was one time we were totally lost on a DIY. It was in Santorini. We stumbled upon a museum in a cave about ancient life in Santorini. The guide did the tour in English for us and Greek for the other couple on the tour. Afterwards, we showed him our HAL provided map and asked him to point out where we were on the map. He laughed and said we were off the map. He asked if we had a car, and when the answer was no tried unsuccessfully to call a cab for us. Then he pointed out a shortcut to get where we would be on the map. How about that crude technology, getting help from a fellow human being! 👍

Yes, I remember on a Princess cruise where a bottle of wine that was on a Princess promo was listed as a gift from our TA. I had had previous discussions with the TA who said he gave OBC rather than specific gifts like that as he felt the passenger should spend it in the way they best wished.

This involves a long plane trip, but what about something in Europe? My first thought was a Baltic cruise, but a Mediterranean cruise either East or West would also have fantastic ports. Any of those should be smooth sailing.

Simple solution to the problem of not being able to book HAL excursions without a smartphone, just don't book HAL excursions. Haven't some of our most experienced cruisers, like for instance that Hank fellow, said many times to not book ship excursions, but instead to explore independently, or sometimes with an independent tour through a roll call?

Yes, those Monday closings can really be a royal pain. We were in Athens on a cruise on a Monday and the new Acropolis Museum was closed. We had a Baltic cruise roundtrip from Copenhagen and stayed a day after the cruise which was a Monday. On the last day of the cruise, John Lawrence the cruise director, gave a lecture for those staying over in Copenhagen and the first thing we learned was how many things were closed on Monday. All the careful pre-planning was basically no longer relevant.

Yes, we have been to a botanical garden in IIRC, Brooklyn. We also once stayed in a AI in Jamaica that was like living in a botanical garden. And we enjoyed the tulips in the Netherlands. DW will take a lot of pictures. I would bet one or probably more become subjects for her to do watercolors.

Better late than never. I bet they reserve the right to reinstate them. Is Japan the last country still with these types of rules?

I just went and googled it, and it seems to be only open from June to September. How much difference can there really be?

Summertime, we will be there in August.

Thank you, assuming you went there, was it worth it? We have been to botanical gardens before and both enjoyed them.

I found this on trip advisor. Does anyone know how near of far or how to get there from the cruise port? https://www.lystigardur.akureyri.is/is/english/practical-information

So their business model seems to be to alienate their most loyal customers while at the same time doing nothing to attract newer, younger customers. Somehow, I do not believe that is a strategy taught at any university granting an MBA.

Contradictory to say you speculated something would happen, but did not make sure you got something in writing. There is a lesson there. Even if you do not expect anything to go wrong, you should always get a written confirmation.

That timeframe sounds like what our TA told us. I do realize that at some point the airlines will have to know our passport information, but so will NCL as we will be in several European nations.

I would think they will look at both positive and negative responses to this change. Passengers who like it should comment to them as passengers who don't like it surely will.

I wonder if they are taking into account the reactions of passengers on the Prima before deciding to implement this change on the rest of the fleet.

$4 for the freshly squeezed orange juice? Do they squeeze it on front of you at the table?

We were first actually introduced to ballroom dancing in 2006 on the former NCL Crown.