Royal Princess goes to the Holy Land Oct. 11

[carhar73]

I have a cruise scheduled on October 11 for 12 days to the Holy Land on the Royal Princess. I would like to hear from anyone else going on this cruise or from someone who has gone on it in the past.

Just how much of the Holy Land do you get to see, besides having to go many miles inland over night. Things that are interesting to visit just on a day trip.

 

Usually I go on very large ships but since this is a much smaller ship, how does it ride? And what is it like on a such a small ship?

 

CAR:o

[Toto2Kansas]

I have a cruise scheduled on October 11 for 12 days to the Holy Land on the Royal Princess. I would like to hear from anyone else going on this cruise or from someone who has gone on it in the past.

Just how much of the Holy Land do you get to see, besides having to go many miles inland over night. Things that are interesting to visit just on a day trip.

 

Usually I go on very large ships but since this is a much smaller ship, how does it ride? And what is it like on a such a small ship?

 

CAR:o

 

There is a small roll call for this sailing already established. You might have a look and join in, many times others have been there before and can assist.

You can find your roll call here: http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=940373

[Pam in CA]

I have a cruise scheduled on October 11 for 12 days to the Holy Land on the Royal Princess. I would like to hear from anyone else going on this cruise or from someone who has gone on it in the past.

Just how much of the Holy Land do you get to see, besides having to go many miles inland over night. Things that are interesting to visit just on a day trip.

 

Usually I go on very large ships but since this is a much smaller ship, how does it ride? And what is it like on a such a small ship?

I've been on a couple of cruises that went to Ashdod and Haifa in the past year and a half, including the Royal Princess. First, the distances aren't "many miles" as you could probably drive from the sea to the border in a lot less than two hours. Heck, it takes just over an hour to get to Jerusalem and you can see the border from there. People who do overnights (as I did) do so in order to start early the next day already in Jerusalem and do as much as possible. You could do almost the same thing by taking two day trips but might miss a couple of things. One thing we saw late in the evening, even after the museum closed and they had to find the caretaker, were the Dead Sea Scrolls but other than a few things, you can see and do a lot with two day trips. There is so much to see and do that it would be hard to list them here.

 

I loved being on the small ship. The Israelis do a face-to-face examination of each passenger's (and crew) passport which can take quite a long time; almost impossible to do on a larger ship with more passengers. Even with less than 700 passengers, it took about 5 - 6 hours to do everyone. They would stop some people and ask questions, refer to lists they had with them, and quite a few people had a 5 - 10 minute personal review. Keep in mind that this is Israeli security, not the cruiseline (which some people blamed.)

[Moe in SC]

We were on the Royal Holy Land Cruise in September, 2007. It was the trip of a lifetime. If you go back to the roll call for this sailing and have the patience to go through it, you will find a lot of good info about shore excursions, etc. Several of us got to know each other over this board and shared trips in the ports. You are going to have a FANTASTIC time!!! See Royal Princess 9/5/07 Athens to Rome board.

[katisdale]

I was also on the 11/4/07 Holy Land cruise on the Royal Princess. I wrote a review of our trip on the review section here on cruise critic. You can access the ships reviews from the front page of this site. We did two day trips in Israel. The first one to Jerusalem (easy Jerusalem) I would not recommend but the second to Galilee was excellent. In Egypt we left the ship in Port Said, spent the night in Cairo, and rejoined the ship the next afternoon (late afternoon) in Alexandria. We used Nile Blue Tours for this and were extremely well pleased.