Dan

On Princess, we usually have them bill our CC in US dollars as Princess charges a higher fee to convert, plus they also had a bad CDN dollar exchange rate on top of that. Our CC company charged less to convert than the 3% that the cruise line adds. I imagine RCI is similar to this. I beleive this is also something you have to advise them to do. They automatically bill in the currency of the card for passengers coming from certain countries that tend to send a lot of passengers and you have to tell them to bill it in US.

Has there actually been anything set up yet in regards to this cruise, or is it still one of tossing around ideas of what line, and what destination people want?

When we were on the Caribbean Princess in January, somebody from our x roll call made arrangements for us to have a section of the Skywalkers lounge available for a couple hours, at no charge. They even supplied a bartender and a waitress. This person made the arrangements a few weeks prior to the cruise.

Just had another look at the WHTI page and realized the card isn't for air travel into the US either. Only land or sea crossings.

If you ever planned to travel outside of North America, you would still need a passport, so there would be no point in getting card. If all you plan to do was cruise the Caribbean, Mexico and Canada, or do land trips between these areas, I could see it being more convenient to just have the card.

The Palm Dining Room, deck 6 aft, under Club Fusion is quieter than the Deck 6 mid-ships Coral dining room. More people come to the dining rooms through the atrium and end up with more of a line-up than the aft dining room, which is harder to stumble across. I asked the maitre d' about reservations and he said to phone the concierge. Never got around to it. Definitely found coming before 7 had shorter lines, and you also had a shorter wait if you are willing to sit at a large table.

We did the express walk-off. The ship docked just before 7am, we were off by 720 and at FLL shortly after 730. Managed to catch an earlier flight to Detroit on standby, but unfortunately couldn't get on the earlier flight from there to home. Still worth it, as we had a very short connection originally. There's also something in the wind about a new boarding process, where they will allow new passengers to start boarding very soon after the departing passengers have left. I'm pretty sure I heard a Princess rep tell somebody in the line that they had started boarding shortly after 10am. Not having heard of a new procedure at that point, I either assumed he mis-spoke (or I mis-heard), or he maybe meant crew members or back-to-back passengers who were sailing again.

We played Bingo twice last week on the CB. I went to the casino a few nights. I lost about a hundred bucks which was okay considering the time I spent in there. I don't play much more than the minimum bets though. $5/$10 on the Caribbean Stud Poker table is it for me.

Thanks everyone. We are so looking forward to what may be our last "kid-less" cruise for a while LOL. I really wish my wife would get home so she can start packing, since the plane leaves in 8 hours LOL. I don't dare pack for her LOL. I might drop in sometime during the week to say hello. The net cafe is conveniently located just where I need to rest on my way to the casino from the cabin LOL.

Well, doesn't look like you have to get up too early to save a deck chair LOL.

We've had ours since we took our first cruise 12 years ago. Sure, it can be a pain to have to get them, but here in Canada, they are making the process a little easier now. We still have just shy of 3 years left on our current ones. One thing I find annoying (although I shouldn't because it means things are going smooth) is that the US agents don't stamp the thing. This is my third passport, and I've a had a grand total of exactly one stamp in them. The thing looks like I never go anywhere. It would be nice to have something to show off LOL.

Picked up my docs today, but strangely, I'm not needing to get away from the weather we've had the last few days. It warmed up on Sunday, temp in the 50's for 3 days (actually hit 60 early this morning) and all our snow is gone. But I'm sure it will be back to winter in the next 11 days and I'll be ready to get out of town LOL.

I think the terminal plays a role in what you think of a particular port. For instance, Port Everglades. We've sailed from there 3 times, with the 4th coming in 2 weeks. HAL and Princess have nice terminals, although we didn't really see much of the Princess one since we were right through and on the ship. But the time we sailed on Carnival out of there, they had us down at a warehouse at the very south end. I think they have since turned this into a combo freight/passenger terminal, but back then (Jan 2001), it was a freight warehouse. Same thing happened to us in Boston. Funny now that I think of it, that was on Carnival too LOL. But, the ship was supposed to sail from New York and was moved to Boston due to 9-11, so the main terminal in Boston was already occupied. I thought the terminal at San Pedro was pretty comfortable to kill some time in. But this was the big terminal which faces the bridge. Not sure what the other 2 smaller terminals are like.

You certainly can on your own. Not sure about through the cruise line. If you do custom air, you have to pay the airfare difference anyway, so I'd seriously investigate booking on your own.

Let's see. The flight leaves at 630am. Leave the house at 530am. So that means packing at about 515am LOL.

We've only had an inside once, on the Grand, and we look back at that cruise as being our favourite. Princess cabins are on the small side to begin with, but they are efficiently designed, so we were fine with 2 of us in there. Last time was our first balcony, but I still found myself going out on deck all the time to watch from different vantage points as we came into or left a port. As others have said, while I prefer a window or balcony, I won't not book a cruise simply because I'd have to be inside. On the other hand, think about the quarantines they do now. God forbid, I'd hate to be one of the people who catches noro on board. At least with a balcony, you can still get outside for those couple days.

Wherever they have food is where I'm eating food LOL. Breakfast is usually buffet because we don't usually get up and about when the dining room is serving. Lunch depends on how late breakfast was and what things are going on that we want to attend. Often on a sea day, it's more of a constant "grazing" through the day, instead of an actual lunch. Grab a burger or pizza on the way from one event to the next, or swing by the buffet for a salad and sandwich.

I'd look at combining a repositioning with an Alaska cruise. It gets tricky because it's illegal to book back to backs that go from one US port and end in another, but you can do it a day layover. For example. Golden Princess May 3, from LA to Vancouver, arriving on May 9th. Spend the night in Vancouver so Jennifer can show you the town. Board the Diamond Princess on May 10th and go to Alaska. Something a little more exotic, but combines many different elements, would be the Star Princess, leaving Acapulco on April 26th, for an 8 day cruise to Seattle. Then do the 7 day Alaska round-trip. This is legal to book back to back. So you end up with 4 ports in Mexico, San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria and Alaska on a 15 day cruise.

I like going the day before. I like getting the travel hassle out of the way, get a good night sleep before the cruise, and build in that wiggle room in case something delays us or our luggage. Our first cruise was part of a group package, and the flight from Toronto was at 630am the day of the cruise. It's just less than a 2 hour drive to Toronto for us, so we got a hotel room near Toronto airport and stayed there the night before. Up at 330am, over to the airport, checked in, clear US immigration and security, have some breakfast and get on the plane. We land in FLL at 930am, and gather the group together. They take us over to the Galleria to kill some time before going to the port. Finally get to the ship at 2pm, and I'm beat. Each cruise after that, I decided we should fly the day ahead. My first justification in convincing the wife we needed to do this was, if we have to pay for a hotel room to catch an early flight out of Toronto, why not take a later flight the day before, and spend the night in the warmer weather. So of course, that next cruise, I book us on the early flight the day before. My argument there was "Well, if we have to pay $90 to park at Toronto airport for the week, we might has well pay $90 to stay at a hotel that lets us park there for the week, take the early flight and have the full day in the warm weather". So, that involved 2 nights in hotels before the cruise. We did drive once, to Boston, but that cruise, as I've said previously, had the special circumstances of 9-11 involved, and we had planned to fly to New York the day of for that cruise, with a pre-flight stay in Buffalo the night before.

We only booked 4 months in advance for the Caribbean Princess and have moved up the waitlist from 357 to 308 today for first seating. I expected this to happen, with that short of an advanced booking time. We did find last time on the Sapphire that they had such a demand for traditional that they took one of the 4 anytime dining rooms and made it traditional. I find it interesting that they say how popular anytime dining is, and then you look at waiting lists hundreds of people long for traditional LOL. We aren't concerned with anytime dining though. The first day, I'll go down and make a reservation for 6pm everynight.

Breakfast, mid morning snack, late morning snack, lunch, snack time, mid afternoon pizza, pre-dinner snack, dinner, dessert, late night buffet, and finally bedtime snack. I think the question should be how often do I make an effort not to eat, and of course, the answer is never LOL.

We met a couple from Kentucky when we were on the Grand in 1999. Very nice people. We kept in touch over the years, and went with them on the Sapphire in 2006. They've been here a couple times in the last year and we've been to their place once last year as well. There have been a few others that we kept in touch with over the years, but no one else we've seen.

Didn't really see much different from our pre-Carnival Princess cruise to our post-Carnival Princess cruise. Other than the natural evolution of cutbacks and service charges expected when the price of the cruise had dropped by almost 50% over several years. But we're obviously not as experienced as many of you here. As for HAL, I'm sure it's not the same as pre-Carnival, but then, the old model would have lead them to extinction had it not been for Carnival stepping in.

My biggest "I can't beleive they did that" moment was on the September 15-22, 2001 sailing of the Carnival Victory. Because of the attacks a few days prior, the lack of flights, it was a New York based cruise moved to Boston and just plain shock at what had just happenned, we had a small turnout of passengers. 756 as I recall, out of almost 3000. It was a great cruise all the way through, until the very last minute. Then somebody in a position of authority decided to leave their brain in bed on the morning of debarkation. They decided since there were so few of us, they didn't need to run an orderly debarkation process. The announcement went something like "Ladies and gentleman the ship has now been cleared for debarkation. Please make your way to the gangway on deck 1 and thank you for sailing with Carnival." Now, this might not have been a real problem if we were docked at a real cruise terminal, with the "jetway"-type gangway where we would leave out of the atrium area. But we were at a normal cargo dock in Boston and had to go down to the same gangway they use for tenders. I can't say the word to describe how this went because of the language filters on here, but it rhymes with 'buster duck". We were quick to get down there and it still took us a half hour to snake down the stairwells and hallways to get to the gangway. Maybe 756 passengers is a small load but it's still a large number of people to cram down those stairs. Had they done the more orderly method of calling luggage tag colors or decks, they would have cleared the ship a lot sooner and left a lot fewer bad tastes in people's mouths.

I had the opportunity to ask the President of my company earlier this year why we have this fuel surcharge when reality is that the fuel prices will never drop to the point listed on our surcharge chart to where the percentage would be zero, and we should just be adjusting our base prices. He said that amongst the various reasons, one is we couldn't raise our advertised rates and lower the surcharge unless Fedex, UPS and DHL also did this because that would appear to make us less competitive than those guys. Another reason is we can't simply raise the base rates on all our contracts, which account for the vast majority of our business. Contracts have provisions for such surcharges, and this is standard across the transportation industry. Shippers don't want to have fuel surcharges included in the base rates because they know that at various points in the year, the surcharge goes down. As for cruise lines, I think for them to just roll the cost over into the fares would require them all to come to an agreement to do this. I'm pretty sure they have tons of expensive research to show that when people shop for a cruise based on price, they look at the fares, and not the extras. The get drawn by the big "$699" in the newspaper ad, and usually ignore the little "*plus taxes and fees of $200" or whatever it might say. So, if the big number in one ad was $699 and was $734 in another, and the small numbers were $200 and $165 respectively, which do you think people will go to? The other factor I think plays a big part in not rolling the fuel into the base fares is that travel agents don't get commission on taxes and fees.