TubT

If I were going to book a cruise today, and had my choice of any of the common lines, it would probably be on Princess. That said, I HAVE seen ships that had problems. And I don't mean just Princess. It is possible to build or modify almost any ship, using the best of designs and designers, and still come up with a dud. For us, the "thud" ship in all of our cruising was the old Holland America Westerdam. The stretch on it very adversely affected the traffic flow and seaworthiness of the ship. Did it make us swear off HAL? Nope. It just made us determine to do a little more research. And just in passing, I learned very long ago that whenever a person complains about the people around them, they are almost universally guilty of the same thing. Takes one to know one, and all that.

Ah, the old food debate.

I didn't think Waffle House had CFS, but I see that at least by the internet, they do. Never had it there. I've had it some pretty good places (I'm sure you've never heard of Babe's, but it's the size of your plate), and I've had it in some pretty lousy places (any truck stop). Keep in mind that, like most cultures, the item was designed to use up pretty poor quality meat. Think fajitas, for example. The meat in a CFS is pretty tough, and it's prepared in a way to make the almost-inedible edible.

I didn't grow up in the south, but I can eat greats. That is, if I can get some butter and syrup. Growing up dirt-poor, my mother frequently made corn meal mush. Slice it, fry it, put on butter and syrup. Same idea, and, actually, pretty close to the same taste.

The biscuits for sausage gravy and biscuits are supposed to be dry and hard. How else are they going to be anything but mush under the gravy?

Thank you....there was some times on the cruise where we were thinking how much nicer it would be without kids on it haha

Mark Twain said, "There are two ways to travel. First class, and with children."

What, no one had the pumpkin soup? On our first Carnival cruise, it was great; it tasted like eating warm liquid pumpkin pie. The next time we tried it, it had become a nothing-like-pumpkin-pie chicken soup. Blah.

As to the escargot, I would never order it in a restaurant, but we usually have it on the cruise. My wife makes an excellent fauxcargots, made using thoroughly sauteed button mushrooms instead of snails. After all, escargots don't have any particular taste; all you taste is the butter, bread, garlic, salt, and cheese.

We have had one cruise line where it wasn't awful, it just didn't fit our idea of how a cruise line should be run. We've never gone back to that line, in about 30 cruises. On the other hand, we cruised 6 times on NCL, and the last one just didn't measure up; poor food, poor service, and the "nickel and dime" atmosphere many have mentioned. We haven't gone back. They made their business decision and decided they could afford to lose a certain percentage of their long-timers to give their bottom line a little boost.

If you wanted to actually do something like that, a better choice would be to go down I35 to Waco, take highway 6 down past Navasota, get on highway 290 and take that to I610 south and then west to I-45, which then goes directly to Galveston (and ends a block or two from the cruise dock). I WOULD take 99 south of 290, or Beltway 8 off 290, but both of those are toll roads that don't accept cash in all their locations.

I-635 around Houston on Saturday morning shouldn't be a problem.

If you have a toll tag and come down I-45, when you get to Beltway 8 you can go east and then south and avoid virtually all the Houston traffic. You rejoin I-45 well south of I-635. About mile marker 30, in fact.

Sounds to me like you joined in with the true spirit of the competition, and you had a good time at it. That's all that counts, in my book.

For those of you interested in seeing the first day Texas has a different drink menu on Carnival. It is below.

I suspect the different drink menu is because they don't pay the tax on all the alcohol onboard, so they can only serve that which has been taxed until they are outside the statutory limits.

Anyone arriving in Galveston today and driving north should be prepared for ice coming from the north, expected to make it down as far as Temple and Fairfield. That will be the case this evening and all day tomorrow.

When they first sailed it WAS a tent. Those ships were old and run down.

How long was it open? Because we sailed out of there over the course of two years, and it was never a tent at that time.

American Hawaii's Constitution, Hawaii islands cruise, about March of 1993. Yup, hooked us.

Both the 7-day ships out of Galveston go there. However, as someone mentioned, it is a tender port with a long, serpentine channel into the anchorage. It IS possible that it might be too windy to go into the port on any given day. Keep in mind that when you buy a cruise, you are buying 7 days on the ship and not necessarily transportation to any specific place.

I mentioned the cruises we have been on up above, but I forgot to mention Celebrity. We went on one cruise, on the Mercury. We found the food nothing to write home about, and it was the only ship where I repeatedly saw supervisors publicly chewing out their workers. We found it uncomfortable enough that we have never gone back.

What do you like?

We quit sailing NCL when they did away with set dining times. If Carnival does away with late dining then it will be Adios Carnival!

We, too, did one last cruise on NCL after they did it, and it was awful. Maybe they've worked the kinks out by now, but it seemed to us the dining room staff just didn't care if you were happy or not.

Now, to address the "never the right time" complaint about early/late dining, I would make one dining room the early dining room and set it at 6 p.m., and make another dining room the "late dining room" and set it at 7:30. That way they wouldn't have to clear out the early diners to get the late diners in, and they wouldn't have to keep out the late diners until the early diners finished.

Well, you can bet that the cruise line's own insurance will not leave the cruise line holding the bag for much of anything. For example, the medical coverage is probably pretty good, but the coverage for a (highly unlikely) cruise line default will be non-existent.

I did the same thing and did all the online check-in stuff when I first booked the cruise, but I saw recently some mentions of "new boarding passes." I went back in and re-printed the boarding passes, and they ARE different, so you might want to do that.

Ah, well, on the internet, things change. I once worked for a fairly busy cruise web site that started on CompuServe. Remember CompuServe? Essentially an internal communication medium for H&R Block that then went public. I can still go to the site, but it hasn't been updated since 2009. But it used to be a busy place. The same thing is true of our club's web site. It used to be extremely busy, and now it is like sitting in an empty cathedral. We have sites on social media, and those are going gangbusters. I would say Cruise Critic probably needs to get a higher profile on those media, and cross-promote. That is, if it's traffic they want.

By carefully choosing your cruise, you can get a pretty low-child-count cruise. None? Not very often. Here are some tricks:

1. Choose Holland America or some such cruise line with a reputation for an older clientele.

2. Choose a longer cruise. Once a cruise goes past 7 days, kids get scarce. A 10-day cruise is almost sure to be almost entirely adults.

3. Choose your date. After about January 2, until Spring Break season starts, most cruises are pretty low on kids. On our last Princess cruise, there weren't 10 kids on the whole ship.

Except for being a little closer to the airports, I don't see a good reason to have a terminal in Houston. And, apparently, Houston has come to that conclusion, too. Now, the question is, will Galveston ever expand? It's at capacity several days per week, as it is.

Keep in mind that the weather there may be less than stellar, so I would find a good place on the starboard rail, and a good place inside, also facing starboard.

You can go to the Galveston cruise webcam and watch the sailaway (about 4:00 pm on Saturday) and get a good idea of where you might want to be.

NCL brought two old bathtubs of ships that didn’t last to Barbor’s Cut. The “terminal” was a tent.

.

The ships NCL brought in probably wouldn't sell enough to make the least expensive terminal profitable, but we thoroughly enjoyed the Norwegian Sea. Those who complain about gaudy decor and overcrowding would like the Norwegian Sea to come back...if they're being honest.

The terminal was not a tent, as you can see in these photos.

The Bayport Terminal closed in the spring of 2016. We last sailed out of there in January of that year, not because we prefer the location, but because we prefer Princess, which was sailing from that terminal. On at least one cruise from that terminal, we were unable to sail at the scheduled time and had to wait until the next morning.

I'm going to have to check my old photos of the Barbour's Cut terminal. It was small, but I don't recall it being a tent. We sailed out of there twice on the Norwegian Sea, a ship we thoroughly enjoyed.

We're platinum on Princess, and this upcoming cruise on Carnival will be our 6th...although Carnival can't find any records of two of them. We prefer Princess, but it's possible to get a bum cruise on any ship. Carnival is the Chevrolet of cruising, but Princess isn't a Cadillac. More like a Buick.

You will probably find Princess to be much more staid, although I have seen plenty of partying going on. The food choices are classier, but that doesn't mean they taste any better.

We have cruised, in addition, on RCI and NCL and American Hawaii (no longer in existence). Out of all of them, Princess matches our lifestyle the best.

On our last Princess cruise, there were less than 10 kids on the whole ship. But we chose the date specifically for that reason.

I haven't had much problem with seasickness, but when I tried Bonine, it gave me an unbelievable headache. I don't know if that is a common reaction.

Once upon a time, we had the pleasure of living in Hot Springs, AR, where one of the "19 Best BBQ Restaurants," McClard's, was found. It was good, but I've had just as good at such places as Spring Creek here in Texas. However, the article that declared McClards as being so good also stated that you could get some idea of how good a place's BBQ was by asking when they had their last big fire. If they haven't had one in the last 10 years, they aren't really smoking the meat. McClards had one while we lived there. But I doubt you'd want to apply that criteria to BBQ served on a ship.