TheOldBear

44 minutes ago, Heidi13 said:

Cruise ships capable of 25 kts mostly date from the late 90's, early 2000's, when bunker prices were significantly lower when the performance criteria were established.

 

Would be interested to know QM2's fuel consumption with 4 DG's & 2 GT's running. Best guess is 400 to 450 tons per day at full speed, as on SS Oriana at 32 kts, fuel burn was about 500 tons per day.

 

With respect to Superstar Virgo, provided she is well maintained and they can afford the fuel, she should still be capable of making the speed. Have operated many Ro/Pax up to 50 yrs old and they could still achieve design speed, if required. 😀

At an onboard talk, Steve Payne mentioned the dramatic improvement in fuel efficiency from the original steam powered Queen Mary to the CODAG [COmbined Diesel And Gas turbine] QM2

The original got 12 feet to the gallon, the QM2 gets 16 feet to the gallon 😉

In interior spaces [deck 1 and passenger spaces] there are recessed fire doors at these boundaries. I think below deck 1 [where the 'behind the scenes tour' did not go] there are no passages through these bulkheads.

1 hour ago, navybankerteacher said:

This could apply once there is a test which identifies past infection as opposed to existing infection - AND it is known whether or not there is remaining capability to transmit.  At present, the tests only indicate the presence of the virus - and our testing capacity is extremely overtaxed.

Apparently many of the antibody tests distinguish between prompt [IgM] and long term [IgG] antibodies.

Having mostly long term antibodies seems to indicate the infection was some time in the past. [Over 60 days?]

I think it will take calibration to see what levels of each type indicate being covered against future infections

14 minutes ago, cruisemom42 said:

 

I think one can make a good argument for testing individuals to determine whether they've had the virus (been infected, with or without symptoms) as part of a strategy to determine how and when people can transition from shelter in place to a return to work.

Its how you can gauge the so called 'herd immunity' - its possible when sampling is started [statistical sampling of population] it will be found that lots of asymptomatic folks show antibodies, indicating both exposure and some degree of immunity. 

3 hours ago, lenquixote66 said:

We only have 2 supermarkets in our town and neither has a pharmacy .

Thats odd - small and 'limited choice' stores [Aldi, Trader Joes, IGA, Lidl] typically do not have a pharmacy, but most branches of the majors [King Kullen, Stop & Shop, Shoprite] seem to have them. [Or you can just follow a few miles of receipts back to a CVS]

7 hours ago, tv24 said:

I understand this, and for us, we end up in Kings Chaos on disembarkation days and it is always a horrible experience.  Total chaos, nowhere pleasant to sit, no one to help with beverages, tacky buffet displays of mediocre food products, just a crummy mass-market cruise experience like the rock bottom price point cruise ships.   Nothing close to anything luxury, and not anywhere I really want to be.  But I was hungry and in desperate need of caffeine.  So nose down and deal with it.  Depressing.

We normally do room service or KC for breakfast - except for disembarkation days.

Then, we typically have the 'do not disturb' sign out and go to an early breakfast in Britannia, then back to the room to brush teeth and collect our things.

Typically, the only part of the process we don't like is the tedious wait in the Queens Room for the last set of disembarking passengers [decks 4 and 5]  

This is the third week of working from home - that's been a routine for a few days each week for years.

Our across the street neighbor is a 'first responder' and needs to continue to work, despite showing symptoms. Mrs Bear was a paramedic, and we cleaned out her kit [masks, gloves, airways...] and dropped them off across the street. 

We currently do not have a cruise scheduled - we were looking at the August 2021 'grand Norwegian' TA round trip. Hopefully putting our deposit down this summer.

2 hours ago, cruisethirsty said:

I'm planning to do a round-trip Trans Atlantic on the QM2 from New York. The only "port of call" is Southampton where many passengers will leave the cruise and others embark for the one way trip to New York. I would like to spend time on shore in Southampton but don't know how much time I will have since different cruise lines and ports handle "in-transit" passengers in different ways. Has anyone done the round-trip and can give me some idea as to what time I could expect to get off the ship? Also, would the on-board time be the usual half-hour before sailing as in most ports or do they require an earlier return?

From my experience this fall [M929B, two Southampton days] the UK paperwork is done on board, so you can just walk off with the self disembarking passengers.  I just made a quick trip to Boots, returning before the terminal was ready for arriving passengers to check in. This resulted in a detour through the baggage area to the crew check in on deck 1. [I needed the umbrella I was carrying for some of the walk back to the terminal]

Over in the "ports of call - Europe - British isles/western Europe" forum, there are some posts by John Bull describing some sample DIY tours - to Portsmouth, Salisbury / Stonehenge, Isle of Wight, or local Southampton sights.

We had two low key/local days - The first was a rainy Sunday, so about an hour after my Boots excursion, we caught a taxi to St Michael's church, and an Uber back to the ship after the service and Tea.

Our second layover day was the following Friday [sunny 🙂 ] we both had picked up a sinus infection [did not respond to the over the counter decongestant from Boots, needed prescriptions from the QM2 medical center ]. Mrs Bear put out the word on Facebook that we would be hanging out at "The Dancing Man" - a brew pub across from the Red Funnel ferry terminal. We did get a chance to meet some of her facebook friends, and had a pleasant couple of hours - and nice beer.

Used Safari's develop menu to change the user agent string to pretend its an iPad - and at first glance things look normal [can post this comment]

On my Mac with Safari, I am seeing the 'site map' as a transparent overlay of the page.

The 'site map' remains fixed in location, and I can scroll the normal page under it.  I cannot click any of the normal links.

Some tests with alternate browsers showed the site was still not fully functional in Chrome [could not log in], FireFox [the 'NoScript' extension may be blocking things]

A fairly recent version of Opera seems to work - need to see when/if things break when I update it to the current version

1 hour ago, LadyL1 said:

Having read the last posts, I decided to look at my VP for cruise in May. It states the QV departs and arrives 1 Jan 1970!

That's an indication of a novice coder bug - that date is the 'epoch' marking the beginning of time for UNIX derived operating systems. The code rendering the date got a zero instead of a proper value.

If it logged an error, it likely was downed out by the sheer volume of internal errors generated within the web site

6 hours ago, exlondoner said:

What I'd like to know is how one discovers if one has an upgrade. In the past, I've initially discovered from the VP.

Back in 2010, we discovered our 'upgrade' at check in in Brooklyn [from deck 4 sheltered balcony to 8003, right next to the Library]

Cunard will book single 'voyages' or multiple overlapping segments - so passengers will change [old one leaving, new passengers arriving] at several ports. For example last on our NYC round trip, there were passengers booked for cruise segments from Quebec to Southampton , NYC to Southampton, Southampton to Hamburg, Hamburg to Southampton, Hamburg to LeHavre, Southampton to NYC, and LeHavre to NYC.

Some things were treated as separate segments [e.g. our WiFi time balance was credited at Southampton, Hamburg and again at Southampton] Other perks were treated as a single 'voyage', like only one 'world club' invite for the round trip.   

Back in 2017, on a TA round trip, two of out table mates had been upgraded to QG - but decided to have dinner in later seating Britannia instead.

22 hours ago, Nanpat said:

What is the best month to go to Iceland and Greenland? What cruises are recommended?

Take a look at Holland America's "Voyage of the Vikings". (transatlantic round trip, typically from Boston).

Check their web site, and discussions here on the Holland America forum.

I have the M10.2 with the 'R' lenses [14-42 & 40-150] and have used them on cruises and general photography.

For general camera setup, you may want to look at Robin Wong's OMD Cheat Sheet Look elsewhere on his blog for many photos taken with Olympus cameras [indoors, outdoors, macro], and gear reviews.

I would say use Single Auto Focus almost exclusively - its quick focusing and reliable. 

When outside in daylight I tend to use program mode with the silent [electronic] shutter. [I will use program shift sometimes to open or close the aperture]  For shots from the moving boat, depth of field will not be an issue for shooting things on shore, or other boats. At base ISO [200] and the kit lenses wide open you will see shutter speeds from 1/125 to 1/800 depending on scene brightness. I don't think a river boat move all that fast [needs to minimize wake] so the vessel's motion will be more important to judge as it impacts your composition than needing to freeze motion.

For night shots, I will use Aperture priority, with the lens wide open [or as wide open as a kit lens goes]. I will pay attention to shutter speeds, and not count on anything not stationary to be blur free when exposures are over 1/30 of a second or so. I do have night shots I am happy with at very low shutter speeds [a second or two] I have a few where the primary light source was a full moon.

37 minutes ago, CPT Trips said:

It seems that not all certified service dogs out there can’t provide the advertised service.

 

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/798481601/the-hope-and-hype-of-diabetic-alert-dogs

 

That said, I hope cruise lines continue to allow diabetic alert dogs to accompany cruisers. 

Two dogs ago, our wiemeriner "Mr Roux", apparently trained himself to alert to low blood sugar. He would nudge/hit or bark until my wife roused. When she checked, her meter would show low readings [40 or less].

When our current dog [Miss Judy, a 10 year old Beagle] paperwork caught up with her it stated that she had been trained/certified for blood sugar. Mrs Bear is taking better care of blood sugar levels these days, but Judy did alert a couple of times - and sure enough the meter said 'too low'.

29 minutes ago, bigrednole said:

I am looking to get cruise insurance for our August cruise. Don't a Google search does not help. It just gives a bunch to look at. Can anyone share a reputable company to go through?

Two brokers frequently recommended here are InsureMyTrip [there is an active Q&A forum] and TripInsuranceStore [Should be an archive Q&A somewhere on the site].

Both assist in comparing options and have guides to what the terms in the fine print actually mean.

If the cruise line has already been paid [past the final payment date], and will not be losing any money - it is likely that they will not wait for a no show passenger [that's their likely view of things, not a cancelation].

I would not expect a refund or credit from the cruise line. Any insurance reimbursement for the non passenger would depend of the insurance policy's fine print. [was that passenger's cancelation a covered reason?]

26 minutes ago, CRocks said:

I'm looking for a roundtrip transatlantic to Spain or Italy from the US east coast. It doesn't have to be the same cruise line. It doesn't even have to end in the same port. In fact, I could even fly to a different European departure port from where the first ends.

 

Basically, I just detest flying anymore + won't even attempt the long flight back. Dates are flexible, but, I ain't gettin any younger. I've looked all over, not having any luck roundtrip. Maybe there's a TA around. TIA

Our last couple of cruises were transatlantic round trips on QM2 - we have also decided to avoid flying as part of our vacation planning, are are less than 90 minutes from the Brooklyn Cruise terminal.

As you have likely discovered, it is difficult to pair seasonal repositioning cruises into a round trip [unless you want several months between eastbound and westbound legs.

You have few round trip options

• Book a round trip with ports to visit between the eastbound and westbound legs - for example we are looking at Cunard's "Grand Norwegian Explorer'.  HAL offers the 'Voyage of the Vikings' as a more port intensive round trip.
• Book a westbound Cunard crossing to pair with an eastbound repositioning. You can meet QM2 in one of several ports [Southampton, Hamburg, LeHavre...] depending on Cunard's schedule.
• Book two separate QM2 crossings, and do stuff in between. Last fall some 'Road Scholar' folks left the ship in Southampton and did a Normandy / D Day tour while the ship was sailing to Hamburg, rejoining in LeHavre. 

3 hours ago, ljmandelbaum said:

Not sure on budget yet I haven't gotten that far in my thinking.  I want to take pictures on our trip as well as getting nice shots of my daughters playing soccer.  Possible basketball if my daughter goes back to it.  Not to mention one of my girls is doing track so I would love to get good pictures of her during her events as well.

 

I want better pictures than I can get from my iphone 11.  

 

We are going on a helicopter to a glacier with dog sledding as well as a float plane.  

With the dog sled and float plane mentions, you probably want to look at 'weather resistant' cameras - some examples include the Panasonic FZ-300 'bridge' camera, most Pentax SLRs and Olympus OMD M5 / M1 / M1X series [not all lens and body combos are weather sealed, even with a weather sealed body]

You may want to take a look at some of the guides over on DPReview 

As an example the 'sports and action' guide is https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/buying-guide-best-cameras-for-sports-and-action

17 hours ago, hal2008 said:

How does logistics work with such cruises?

(muster station training, welcome and goodbye events)

 

For example, a particular ship doing a circle trip in western med can be sold both as

starting and ending in barcelona as well as

starting and ending in rome

 

Cunard will often have several segments of the same 'voyage' available for booking as separate cruises. For example the M929B round trip had passengers on segments including  NYC to Southampton, NYC to Hamburg, Southampton to Hamburg, Hamburg to Southampton, Hamburg to NYC,  Hamburg to Quebec, LeHavre to NYC - and likely other combinations.

We only had required muster station attendance once, pier side in NYC [Brooklyn Cruise Terminal], and for the first time we left the PFDs [life jackets] in the room. Each embarkation port had its muster drill for new passengers, all at deck 7 muster stations. These were before the 'all aboard' time for in transit passengers, so I do not know how disruptive they were.

1 hour ago, Cruisingranny1 said:

I was also looking for a TA board. We are doing our first in Oct from Barcelona to Tampa. I was wondering how time changes work on a TA? All of our other cruises we kept on ship time but how does that work on a TA? We surely dont stay on Barcelona time until we get to Tampa do we? Sorry if this is a silly question! 🙂

Time changes are at the ship's discretion.

On recent transatlantic round trips the eastbound leg moved clocks to 1PM at Noon [lose an hour] - and got the hours back on the westbound [I think there were two 2AMs for an extra hour's sleep.

12 minutes ago, oskidunker said:

First time on Cunard. By now Princess would have them up. I always  book early since they use Dynamic pricing. 

Typically excursions are posted [if the voyage personalizer lets you in] about two weeks before the final payment date.