?? for travlers on the NCL Dawn this year

During the past four weeks the Dawn made two roundtrips from Boston to Quebec to Boston. I will be doing this next year and have some questions.

1. How many excursions does NCL offer on this trip?

2. Are they worth the investment?

3. If you did not take an NCL excursion - what did you do in the ports (both NB and SB).

4. Did you tour Boston pre/post cruise - what did you do? what tour company did you use? Where did you stay? Did you use an NCL hotel? Transfers?

A bit about us:

We are a group of three, myself, my DW and MIL. ages 60, 60, 80 - a very spry 80 BTW :D. We have some mobility issues due to broken bones in ankles of DW and MIL - MIL is somewhat limited on both speed and distance - She did OK on our AK cruise walking around Skagway and Ketchikan but this cruise more that doubles the ports - granted there will be a couple of sea days to recoup but we don't want to wear her ankle out - so even though everybody says these cities are walkable - I need to keep it to a minimum.

We plan on flying Alaska Airlines - they have a direct flight from PDX to BOS that is both convenient and relatively inexpensive. The best day for us to fly is Wed so we would have Thurs to tour Boston and Fri to get to the ship. Then spent the next 14 days enjoying the cruise and all the ports. We plan on flying back Fri afternoon - I think the flight leaves around 5:00 - whatever time it takes to turn the plane around from the PDX inbound flight.

None of us have been to New England/Eastern Canada so we are trying to make the most of the time we have there. We love wildlife, scenery, different cultures, I like anything railroad, MIL is into genealogy, DW is along for the ride :D. I would like to visit the Narrow Gauge Museum in Portland ME. (the other Portland :D)

I am also posting this in the NCL Board as well.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

I can answer a few question for you but not all.

1. NCL offers a lot of excursions! If you are doing the round trip you will have about 9 ports. We only did the Quebec to Boston part of it and we had 5 ports. I think there are 4 or 5 from Boston to Quebec.

2. There are some excursions I would NOT recommend if you have mobility issues. Several of ours were walking on cobblestone and uneven walkways. Are they worth the investment? Maybe. We take the ship sponsored excursions 99% of the time. One of our buses broke down and we were late getting back to the ship. We didn't worry because we knew they would wait. One of the excursions was a huge disappointment because we hardly had time to get off the bus before we had to get back on!

3. Can't help with this.

4. We took our luggage to our hotel and dropped it off and then we took off on our own walking the Freedom Trail. Our hotel was at the end of the trail so we walked all the way to Bunker Hill ( the beginning) and then walked back. It is a lot of walking!! We stayed at the Boston Park Plaza. The hotel is an old historic hotel. It gets great reviews and horrible reviews. Our experience was good. Nice big room overlooking the street. It's not cheap, but cheaper than other hotels. Be careful booking hotels using discount sites. You get what you pay for.

90% of the passengers on our cruise were well into their 70's. We were the minority in our early 60's so expect slow moving people with walkers, scooters, wheelchair's etc. this especially makes a difference when getting off busses at excursions.

Enjoy your cruise. We enjoyed the ports but completely missed the leaf changing season. We were about 2 weeks early.

Oh, let me add. If you book an excursion in Bar Harbor on the return trip don't book an early one. You have to go through immigration and it's hectic. We had a 8:15 meet time for ours so we had to get up at 6:15 to have to to get ready and eat before standing in line for immigration. If you have an early excursion you do get to go first but it makes for an early wake up.

Thank you for your comments -

I did not find that many excursions when I looked on the NCL site - I saw lots for the Gem, but few for the Dawn - My NCL for my trip is all messed up so I can see anything there. Others have reported about the problems at Bar Harbor - we have not looked that far ahead yet - I am still getting to Quebec :D

I am leaning towards using private tours or renting cars but wanted to know more about the NCL options first.

I understand that most of the hotels in downtown Boston are on the older side- something we on the west coast are not used to :D

I am hoping that next year the leaves will be a bit earlier :) hard to predict mother nature.

We loved Quebec. We could have spent days in that town and enjoyed all of it. The ship was there overnight so we did have almost two full days and it still wasn't enough time. Hundreds of people came out to see us off. It was the best sail away ever.

For Nova Scotia the leaves generally are at their best the second week of October. They are a bit late this year. There are still some trees which have not changed colour.

We were onthe Dawn last month. We did take a few excursions with the ship, but in Saguenay with booked with a local tour operator a 4 hour tour of the area. It was really worth it, half the price of the ship tour, this company operates with 24 passenger buses, that's a lot better than the big buses. Make sure you book online in advance,the tour was sold out when we got there and some friends that wanted to join us could not get on. Good reviews on tripadviser.

Aventure Fjord et monde.

Patricia