Best and Cheapest way to stay in touch with USA

My wife and I will be on a 12 day Mediterranean Cruise. I have an Apple lap top and a Droid Global Phone from Verizon. What is the cheapest way to stay connected?

Cheapest? Probably a port Internet cafe. Crew will know where they are, if you don't see a big banner proclaiming "INTERNET" from the ship. Med cruises are usually port intensive, so easy to keep in touch.

Verizon charges 2.49/minute to call from the ship, less for text, but call Verizon or go online and check your plan's in-port foreign roaming rates. Also make sure you have international access enabled for your phone/plan.

Laptop access and cost depends on which ship and line you are going on. Macs usually work fine, but some people report occasional difficulties getting connected.

I just did 2 weeks in Europe, and was able to log onto FaceBook most days to communicate. Internet cafes are easy to find. I also set up a new email account on gmail, just for travel-related issues. Only give that address to the people you want to communicate with over vacation.

I prefer e mail over the phone.

We type our e mail in word and then copy and paste it and then connect to the internet to send it via e mail. The same can be true on messages you receive. This will minimize your internet time.

Keith

Internet cafes in ports are clearly the cheapest - by many dollars per connection - than anything offered by the ship. We have always found one within a couple of minutes walk from the pier -- almost any crew member can tell you for any given port - otherwise just ask atthe nearest shop when you get off the ship.

I agree with the above posters, the internet cafe on shore is the least expensive way to stay in touch. For sea days, I use a majicjack and a small phone to make calls back to the USA, cost is same as internet usage, but can be a bit spotty at times.

Even cheaper is a 3G connection if you have something like a Kindle. I wasn't able to find a free internet connection for my laptop on my last trip (a couple of months ago), but I connected on my Kindle everywhere, including on the train, bus, and just walking around town. It's slower than a computer connection, but it's free and was available everywhere on land; I was able to read and send e-mails and surf the web (if I was patient, that is).

Just returned from a 28-day South American cruise on HAL, from Rio through the Amazon to Fort Lauderdale. I bought $100 worth of ship's Internet minutes (280 minutes), prewrote all my messages on my Mac and then pasted. I also used Internet cafes where I could find them but most were not wi-fi capable, meaning that I could not use my Mac but had to use their machines with slightly different keyboards etc. In Brazil, the landbased Internet cafes were as slow as the ship's satellite system, which was slow and kept eating up minutes just in getting set up.

The Kindle's 3G Kindle can be frustratingly slow and may not allow access to all URLs -- I never was able to get through to hotmail.com -- but in the Caribbean it worked surprisingly well once I got the hang of it. Another plus was that as long as we were sailing close to the coast I could scroll and post from open areas of the ship. The Kindle's free wi-fi rejects the ship's signal so there is no danger of anyone incurring unwanted expenses that way.

One note: Using a different machine frequently may freeze your accounts. Happened to my facebook account several times. It's easy to restore but you need to answer security questions or recognize pictures of your hundreds of facebook friends whom you may have never met.