donaldsc

The reason that nobody knows if their extender will be confiscated is that the people who are confiscating them have no idea why they are taking or why they are confiscating them. All they know is that they have a little piece of paper that they were given that says "me see power strip; me confiscate power striip. Do you think that they have any idea at all of the difference between a surge protected strip and a none protected one. DON

Princess' idea of a small ship is anything under 3000 passengers. My idea of a small ship is anything under 650 passengers or maybe a bit larger if it is a Viking Ocean ship. DON

I have no idea about why but I will comment about Valdez versus Sitka. Both are great ports. Valdez is neat and an advantage of it is that it and the town has not been ruined by Monstrosities of the Seas visits. Sitka is one of the best stops on the general port stop circuit which does not get hit as often as s the other towns on the circuit that get hit by 2 or 3 Monstrosity ships with regularity. For example I do not think that Sitka has any of the over hyped chain jewelry stores as the other ports. Your trade off of Sitka versus Valdez is not a bad trade off. DON

None of you have said what your cruise date is. We are on the Oct 31 B2B and I have set up a number of private tours. If you tried to set up private tours you probably found it difficult to find them. Right now I have 2 spaces available on an Aomori tour and 2 on a Sakata tour. If you are interested drop me a line at donald.schoengold41@gmail.com.

You have a better opinion of your fellow cruisers and of mankind than I do. DON

When we were in Athens we used Uber to get around. Reasonable prices and easy to use. Uber in Athens is different from Uber in the states although it used the same software. Instead of people using their own private vehicles as Uber vehicles they are taxis that are also part of the Uber system. DON

What should happen is that the ship should leave at precisely the posted time. If the departure time is say 6:00 PM the ship should leave at 6:00 and 10 seconds even if a bunch of people are running down the dock. If they did that it might teach the entitled slowpokes a lesson they would not forget. We have a friend who was always late. The joke was that she would be late for her own funeral. One time she and her husband were going to take a vacation in Hawaii - we live in Vegas. Departure time for the Vegas to LAX was say 9:00 AM. This means that the boarding gate closed about 15 minutes before the takeoff time. She gets to the gate before departure time but after gate closure and they would not let her get onto the plane. They missed their connection in LAX to Hawaii. I am surprised that her husband did not kill her but you can be sure that she never did that again. DON

Have you priced adventure cruises - not the luxury adventure cruises but the more normal ones. It would be hard to get one of those for less than 14K and I have seen ones that I would love to do that are as high 20K to 45K. I would do them if I could afford them in a heartbeat. On the other hand there are cruises where you would have to pay me 14K to do them. DON

Under normal circumstances I would say to call Azamara directly. But now maybe that is not a good idea. However in general your best way to get info on a specific cruise is to call them or use their chat line. DON

Venice is a wonderful city and it is even better if you are there in the late afternoon or evening after the boat tourists are gone and it is not wall to wall cruisers. Get there a few days early and enjoy the polace. DON

If you use USD anywhere outside of the US you may be ripped off on the exchange rate and will almost certainly get change in local currency. That means that if you buy something for $1 and give them a $10 bill you will get $9 back in local currency. If you plan to pay w USD bring a bunch of small denomination bills. Also make sure that the bills are in pretty decent shape as many vendors will not accept bills that are in bad shape. DON

Or how big your bank account is. This question is sort of meaningless.

The obvious answer in any bidding situation is to bid what the item you are bidding for is worth to you. Then stop looking so you will not be tempted to end up bidding too high. DON

My Antarctic sailing is more recent than the original Antarctica sails but I have been told that in the olden times doing Antarctica had to actual get into their life boats during muster drill. Can you imagine having to do that now. I agree with others that in the if a real emergency occurred people would be running around like headless chickens. I would not wish bad luck on anyone but perhaps a real emergency on a ship might be useful to bring us back to reality. DON

I do not understand why so many people use cruise line airplane flights. I may sometimes but not always pay a little more to book directly with the airline but when the inevitable problems or issues occur I can talk directly to the company that is actually providing the service. Makes life easier. DON

Have you ever booked airline tickets. There have been times when I looked at a flight and when I came back less than an hour later there was a significant price change both up and down. DON

Thanks for the good wishes. If I remember correctly it was on a cruise in Spain. We are still keeping busy cruising and visiting AK. Our most recent cruise was on the American Queen Voyages Ocean Victory - 150 passengers and Sitka to Vancouver. A great cruise. Got into lots of small towns and great fjords. We have 2 more AK cruises scheduled. We have a family tradition of taking our grandkids to AK when they turn 1 and w/o their parents. These cruises are a hoot. Covid delayed the last voyage but in 3 weeks we leave for AK with Leo on the Grand Princess. Also a month or so back Carole realized that we have never done an early season cruise to AK so we booked a very early season cruise. Should be a bit of a different AK experience. That should do it for AK for a while. We did have a Hurtigruten cruise from Vancouver to Nome booked but Covid messed up that one and when AK cruising restarted they got very expensive. Best to you and keep on cruising. Don and Carole

Good IT people do extensive and large scale testing before releasing a piece of software to the world. Even then there are sometimes problems. Considering the problems that the Azamara people are having, they must have missed that class when they attended IT school. DON

I know that Northern Aurora knows this but there is a good reason for the snow dumps. Valdez, Alaska Valdez can see as much as 325″ of snow annually and being surrounded by the Chugach Mountains definitely helps that snowfall total rise. The small town of 4,000 offers superb heli-skiing and deep-sea fishing that attracts tourists from all over the world. DON

Just got an e-mail from Viking telling us that. Why? We are not happy. Has Covid disappeared. DON

Do you have fun on your cruises with those self imposed restrictions? DON

There is a problem with this. You want to measure the inside temperature but you have the thermometer stuck to a piece of glass that is picking up heat or cool from the inside of the cabin. How accurate is it going to be. And before anyone say that you can hang a thermometer from something on your balcony if you have a balcony cabin - that also will not work because of the chilling effect of air movement or heat from sunlight if you are on the sunny side of the ship. Measuring outside temperature is trickier than you think. You might read this - https://weatherworksinc.com/news/temperature-measurement DON

I would love to know what the crew really thinks. What did you expect the crew members to say when you offered the chair to them. DON

The only difference might be whether you want the sun in your room in the morning or afternoon.I like sunsets and I am not up for sunrises so I would on the room and on the side of the ship to give me PM sun. DON

You can be sure that if you are in a previously infected room your room is now probably the cleanest room 0n the ship./ DON