Mike B Landlubber

Thanks all! Sounds like all will be well

To avoid disappointment I signed up early for a shore excursion next September rated as “strenuous”. Since that time, I had to have a knee surgery that isn’t recovering as well as expected. I will still be able to go on the cruise, but worry about doing the strenuous excursion, though I do have some lead time to hope my knee improves. I’m thinking of canceling this and shifting to a moderate excursion, but I see that I apparently used a shore excursion credit from Have It All to sign up for this, and it shows my refund as $0.00. If I cancel, will I get my shore, excursion, credit back, or is that gone if I cancel? I attempted a search, but can’t find this specific issue amongst a horde of generic shore, excursion cancellation questions.

I bumped into the cruise ship resentment thing big time this year—I’ve never been to Norway, and when I heard Norway was proposing cruise ship restrictions for many areas in 2025, I immediately (Literally within minutes) booked a cruise for 2024 that contained many of the controversial ports. I thought I slipped in at the last second, but HAL has since changed the controversial ports to others! GRRR To be on topic, I am one of those scaredy cats who insists on arriving two or more days early, and I often take time to explore the last port afterwards. When I took a cruise in Australia last year I spent a week before the cruise in two different cities, and a week after the cruise in Sydney. But at ports during the cruise, I usually book a shore excursion but otherwise am a Scrooge. I’ve visited many ports and literally spent nothing except for the shore excursion cost.

I thought about doing these or a similar cruise, but reluctantly decided to go north to Japan (which I haven’t seen yet) instead. There are many worthy things in Indonesia, so I envy you, and will definitely follow a thread on your trip if you post one here!

It can be a problem for those who service travelers. In Egypt back in the 90s I was implored to help a hotel attendant who had received a tip in the form of a large-value note from Brunei, who said he couldn’t find a way to use it. I still haven’t made it to Brunei, and regretfully declined to help him.

Hello, I’m in the process of booking my first Windstar cruise and this thread has been incredibly helpful and confidence-building! My cruise should include the Corinth Canal and like you I’m looking forward to that especially, so seeing pics from a customer was really excellent.

I’ll be aboard on a different itinerary this Fall. how are the different restaurants?

You might look into a VPN that allows you to pretend to be in a different country than you actually are…

Good choice! I took a Baltic cruise in May and thought I regretted missing St. Pete, I enjoyed the Baltic states so much that I have scheduled a land side trip of a few days in Riga before a Western Europe cruise next summer. Gotland is wonderful also. Our tour guides were uniformly grateful for us being there. Apparently losing Russia has killed the demand for Baltic cruises, and their customer base is way down. To get on topic, I think NCL is being smart. As RD64 mentioned, NCL will have good options for port slots and shore excursion operators, and at least their passengers will know the score.

I took a TA cruise on Divina in the Spring, and though it was different from my usual HAL or Norwegian, I found it an acceptable cruise and great value. I’m looking at taking a lengthy (4week) cruise on Poesia that includes TA. In reading the fairly recent expert review here on CC, I find it says that they have wired Ethernet, but no broadcast WiFi in the rooms. On the MSC website, I can’t find a Way to check WiFi packages until I have a booking. Looking at individual reviews for the ship, I see several that say the WiFi stinks, but the only one with anything specific includes a price list that implies WiFi package is available, but also says it is a general price list, not ship-specific. I have no illusions that WiFi will be great, especially in mid-Atlantic, but I need/want at least slow but usable WiFi most of the time, and I don’t even think an Ethernet cable will work with my preferred iPad. Can I get assurances from some recent Poesia cruisers that they have at least typical cruise ship WiFi packages (poor or no streaming service and occasional lagginess or mysterious outages will be tolerated) available in the cabins? Thanks for any help!

Our charter jet arrives in Tugluktuk. The truck carried our checked bags and (I was told) some fresh food that was cargo on the plane to the ship. After checking our bags at Edmonton Airport, we didn’t see them again till they appeared outside our cabin door after dinner the first night. My Cabin on Ocean Endeavor. We received daily briefings on what was happening, what decisions were made, and details about landings, including hiking routes and options. The colorful large-scale map is a sea ice forecast! A typical menu. Food was great, especially considering where we were. We lucked into an Aurora display on the last night. You can see the ship’s radar in silhouette.

It occurs to me to do a batch showing how BIG the icebergs and terrain were. In one shot taken over the heads of people, don’t miss our ship next to the icebergs. I will do one more batch of photos oriented towards the ship and some practical matters, but not tonight.

Here are a few more… Our Zodiac pulls away from the mother ship on an iceberg exploration mission. If you look at the driver’s right wrist, you’ll see a red loop, connected to the motor with a coil of red. This is a deadman switch. If she falls overboard, the red thing will be yanked out of the motor and the motor shuts down. Essential if you’re driving one of these by yourself, and here it helps her avoid a helpful passenger trying to use the motor for an rescue and running her down! They provided oars for us to use in that situation…. Masochists had the opportunity to do the “Polar Plunge” and jump in freezing water. I am a wimp and stayed warm and dry. I understand villages like this one typically get deliveries by two of these small cargo ships a year. We were quite lucky to see it! We had the opportunity to land on a free-floating bit of sea ice. Quite an adventure!

One last set of pics…. Before we went ashore, the staff checked the area out for polar bears. We wouldn’t go ashore if bears were near. Once ashore, we still had armed bear guards! Graves of three men from the doomed Franklin expedition in the 1840s, plus one casualty of another expedition sent to search for them. The town of Qaanaaq (Sorry, it is in Greenland). So far north, the playground can see icebergs!

Street signs are hard to mount and maintain in frozen permafrost, so they put them in buckets of gravel. Most that I saw had toppled over anyway! In Gjoa Haven, they made a big deal of our visit. This fellow does a traditional drum welcome dance. Polar bears froma Zodiac. This was with a 500mm camera lens, about the same as a binocular view.

As it happens, my trip was with Adventure Canada. I was very impressed with them, they had numerous expert staff who took great care of us and did their best to accommodate individual needs and interests. The geologist and archeologist were especially good, as were two Inuit guides. Food and facilities on the ship were great, especially considering we were in the far North. As for this particular itinerary, it was an amazing trip and worth the admittedly high cost. After I had booked it, an experienced guide I took a different trip with warned me that wildlife would be around, but probably not plentiful on the trip and he was right. I had created an expectation in my mind that wildlife would be plentiful and close as in a trip to Antarctica I took several years ago. It ends up that this wasn’t a fair expectation. Most larger animals have been hunted and avoid humans, and the operator deliberately avoids being close to polar bears, though we did see over a dozen bears at a safe distance from our Zodiacs on one spectacular day. The other big wildlife sightings were walruses from a distance one time, and a narwhal. I didn’t see other whales, though a couple I was friends with reported seeing some from their cabin early one morning. Lots of seabirds. Some Zodiacs sighted seals. What we did get was amazing scenery and experiences among icebergs and wilderness. We got chances to interact with Inuit, including some with local residents as well as the two Inuit guides, and visit very small towns that were different than anywhere else I’d ever been. In between excursions they offer almost nonstop presentations by their experts, and most experts were excellent explainers and presenters. If the history of Arctic exploration interests you, there are plenty of opportunities to see stuff associated with the Franklin expedition, old Hudson Bay Co. or Mounty stations, pre-Columbian sites, etc. One of my adventurer friends who has been to Antarctica, the Aleutians, and Greenland has declared herself insanely jealous after seeing my pics, and intends to take a similar trip! At this time of year I had no expectation of seeing Aurora, and they warned us it was possible but unlikely, yet we did get a nice Aurora light show one night! Embarking and debarking via Zodiac was no big deal. At boarding we literally rode school buses from the basic airstrip to the shore to board the Zodiacs from the beach! We disembarked near a former US Air Force base in Greenland where we had a dock to step on to from the Zodiacs. We then rode commercial hired buses for about twenty minutes to the airport. Neither was especially difficult. They moved our checked luggage to and from shore by Zodiac, but crew took care of it. We were able to take carry-ons with us and keep them under our control if we wished. and I took a small bag with medication and expensive cameras. Crew assisted with holding it while I boarded the Zodiac. Getting on and off of the Zodiacs at sea for excursions was sometimes bouncy, but I didn’t see anybody with serious difficulties despite an older group of passengers. We got a lot of help from staff getting on and off the Zodiacs. One passenger had a missing checked bag on the flight out, it was apparently mishandled by the charter airline and we were told a couple of days later it had been found at another airport, which of course was no help to the poor traveler! We were told that for specialized cold weather stuff the ship had some loaner equipment to take care of them, but I don’t know specifics. AC emphasizes that this is an expedition, not a cruise, and things are uncertain and subject to change. One of our landings was delayed and rearranged at the last minute because polar bears were too close to the expected site, and one was cancelled completely because of rough water and fog. We deviated for about two days from our expected itinerary because of sea ice (I was completely happy with the alternate route and this is not a complaint, just reporting a part of adventuring in a remote area). We had daily briefings on conditions, forecasts, what they were doing, and why. You will get the most out of the trip if you are fit and a good hiker. They usually had two or three options at each landing based on hiking ability. I have been putting off a knee operation for a couple of years, which meant I couldn’t do some things I would like to do, but I was still pleased with my experience. Since I returned, I’ve scheduled the operation so I will be ready next time! 🙂 I will post more pictures.

I thought these would be of interest, but wasn’t sure of the best place to post them. Admins, move if necessary and accept my apologies. The trip was with a smaller “expedition” line that doesn’t have a forum. This is a map of our actual track. It was pretty close to the projected track. We began in Kugluktuk, Canada, and ended near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. Both embark and debark were by Zodiac!:) We were on a converted car ferry modified to deal with ice, so it was a decent-sized ship, but still seemed small compared to the wilderness! Moving through loose ice floes. I will post more when I’m sure this is the appropriate place and verify appropriateness and interest….!

Voila! I hope…

I returned from an Adventure Canada trip a week ago. We had been told in advance that our vaccination cards would have to be presented to board. In the event, we just had to sign (with all sorts of oaths, penalties, and spitting over our shoulder) a declaration that we had been vaccinated (may have been more specific, but don’t remember now). Both governments and travel providers could decide they want the card in a flash.

I have received distilled water on HAL, Norwegian, and MSC with no problems either for free or for minimal cost, roughly five dollars. I think it is pretty universally-available.

I don’t see a forum for passport control issues or for general EU issues. My search attempts gave zillions of irrelevant results, so am posting it here. If there’s a better place, please advise. I had two odd incidents related to border control on a recent Europe trip, and I think there are things going on that I don’t understand. I’m wondering if someone can enlighten me. My itinerary was that I took a transatlantic cruise from the US to Rome, flew from Rome to Copenhagen, took a Baltic cruise that ended in Stockholm, then flew from Stockholm back to US (I know, I have a tough life!). On both cruises, the cruise line viewed my passport when I boarded and took down the information, but gave the passport back to me and the cruise line never saw or asked for my passport again. I was never asked for passport when entering any country on shore excursion or debarking from either ship. The flight from Rome to Copenhagen and the flight home were both on SAS. I don’t think it matters, but the transatlantic cruise was on MSC and the Baltic cruise was Norwegian. Weird incident 1–when I checked in for the flight from Rome to Copenhagen, the agent wanted to know where I would fly to next. This flight was separate from the flight home in my mind and the airline bookings, so I explained that I would be done after arrriving in Copenhagen. The ticket agent seemed unable to comprehend that an American who wasn’t a Copenhagen resident would fly there and do nothing else with the airline. My explanation that I would be getting on a ship in Copenhagen didn’t help. She began to get a bit agitated, and I was worried that I would be denied boarding. I finally mentioned that in a couple of weeks I would be flying home to US. Since that happened to be on SAS she could locate it and she settled down and I could proceed. I was puzzled by all this, I speculated that maybe there was an EU rule that would have forced the airline to fly me back to Italy if I arrived with no further travel, but that didn’t seem likely to me. I wonder if I would have been allowed to board if my return home reservation hadn’t been with SAS so she could confirm it. Weird incident 2–When I went through border control to leave Sweden and fly home, the border control agent noted that my passport had no record that I had entered the EU. She had nothing to show that I had entered the EU. I explained what I had done and showed her my previous itinerary on an app in my phone (Thank goodness for TripIt!) and she was reasonable about it and stamped my passport to leave. I’m concerned that if she hadn’t been reasonable, I might have had real trouble getting home in a timely manner. I didn’t skip out on anything with passport control while leaving, and there was never even an opportunity to talk to a person from border control when leaving either ship. Does anyone have any insight on this to help me for the future? Is there anything I should have done but didn’t?

On the internet before my cruise, I shelled out $99 (from memory) for a fancy meal package at Butcher’s Cut. I am a compulsive documenter and took a lot of photos which may interest some. I’ll comment on things but be warned I’m not an expert gourmet and I am a complete ignoramus on wine. Here is an overall shot taken before anything but the bread had arrived. I could hear music from live musicians outside, but didn’t find it too bothersome. I was surprised how often one set of arriving/departing guests would recognize other diners and stop to say hello, but the joint wasn’t bustling. Here is the menu overall. For this package, I got my choice one of the appetizers, the shellfish platter, my choice of one of the entrees, and two glasses of wine, white to start with the shellfish platter, and red for the entree. You get a rack of four sauces as mentioned on the menu, your choice of side dish, and your preferred desert. Here’s the bread. Oddly, I didn’t like it as well as the bread served in the main dining room. I recommend ignoring it, you will need all your room for the food coming! My waiter asked which wine I preferred, and since I need to use Google to tell red wine from white wine, I placed myself in his hands. This was what I received (a glass, not the whole bottle). As an Oklahoman who is used to large high-quality steaks, I found the shellfish platter the most impressive part of the meal. It included oysters, mussels, shrimp, crab, a lobster tail and a scallop. I loved it! Everything was excellent. I suspect two diners would share one of these, so I may have come out ahead (if too much food is ahead) by dining alone. This is a large post and I’m not sure if we have limits on photos in a single post, so I will finish the meal in a post later this evening.

I am on MSC Divina and just watched you depart past us. Here are your sailing photos, for anyone on board!

While in the Army I was told that once the various choices about allowances and deductions on my pay were working tolerably, never, ever touch them or change them again. That wisdom has served me well and has applications in many areas of life…. 🙂

Was there a significant price advantage? I’ve never sought out those rooms, but have read unsupported claims they aren’t that large a savings.