DevonianCruiser

Great to hear 🙂 Off the 30 plus cruises I’ve done, my favourite ever was on the Jade so she hols great memories for me.

I’ve been looking and checking my current booking for December. We’re in a GS. Now nearly £1,000 more than I paid. Never sure how half these sales work really as the price seems to go up more often than not.

Come back Richard Spacey. - that fella was hilarious 😜

I lived in Mississauga with my uncle for 6 months as a 19 year old in the late 80’s and loved it there. Thanks for all your photos on this thread, they’ve been amazing. Enjoy your trip around Australia - if your driving from Brisbane and can stop off in Noosa, I highly recommend it 😎

Wow some amazing photos of Sydney and Newcastle 😎 So makes me want to go back down under! We’ve planned it for Dec/Jan 2025/26 to coincide with Christmas holidays but these pictures are making me want to go right now 🤣 Keep posting your stops please 😎

Lovely photos and takes me back - we did a two week cruise from Sydney around NZ in 2019 and it was fantastic. Auckland was lovely and I recall the Bay of Islands was just perfect weather 😎 Random question that’s just occurred to me - if you do a world cruise how does your status increase? Does it only go up when you get off at the end or do they count it in sectors? I was thinking you could go from zero to diamond status in a few months and get 4 free drinks a day if they do it in sectors.

Some beautiful photos here 😎

Anyone know if they do the poker tournaments on the Explorer on sea days? I can hear you all saying ‘why do you ask Devonian Cruiser? 😜 Okay since you all asked I’ll tell you . . . . . Back in March 2013 we went on Explorer from New York down to the Caribbean. Can’t remember much about itinerary. Anyway I digress. On the sea days they held a poker tournament which I’m guessing was around $60 or $70 and the winner and runner up each day made the final table on the last sea day of the cruise. I somehow made it to the final and even more surprising won the final. I won a weeks cruise on the Oasis for December that year. Oasis was a fairly new ship and was an amazing prize. There was a poker tournament for all the winners on all the tournaments throughout the fleet. I guess that there were a few hundred of us. First prize was $50,000 I recall. I lasted about 3 minutes 🤣 Anyway had a free cruise and a cocktail party. The Explorer cruise we’ve got booked in December has 4 sea days so enough for a tournament. . . . If they still do them of course P.S. Don’t recall any karaoke - good or bad 😉 Nor that Perry fella, but I think he was on Navigator on our European cruise a couple of years back. 😎

Ah okay so they book a slot so to speak with a ship and can change it. Never knew that - thanks.

That’s fantastic, thanks for the info and definitely food for thought. Really want to see the Keys but probably not likely we can do them and any of Miami. Plus with the 4 hour drive back not sure we’d want to do that on the day of the cruise. Maybe we’ll concentrate on Miami this time and look to do the keys another day 🙂

We have 3 nights before our cruise. Land at around 3pm. We were supposed to go to key west last year and it didn’t happen. Just wondering if it’s worth a short visit - so maybe hire a car and drive down after landing and having 2 nights there followed by a night in Miami? Or is it too much to do after a 10 hour flight? We’ve been to Miami before but it was 10 years ago so not sure whether we should just have 3 nights there. We’ve an 8 year old. One other question, our flight home is at 5.20pm, does that give us any time to do something after docking in the morning? Only ships tour o can see at the moment is recommended for international flights after 6pm.

Out of curiosity I looked at this link and can see Voyager of the Seas in December 2025 in Brisbane, but nothing on the RC website. We’re looking to do Australia and Asia again around then.

Thanks I’ll look at that 🙂

We’re looking to do a cruise at the end of 2025, maybe beginning of 2026 and the cruise dates only run to April 2025. Any reason why RC don’t have them out yet as they seem to in other destinations? I’m hoping they are going to continue sailing those regions.

Just found this thread LB, I’ve been following your Singapore one and didn’t realise you’d done all this too. Sounds like a fantastic holiday indeed. Shame you missed the Sounds as they are superb, but things happen. Plus it’s always an excuse to come back 🙂 Can you let me know what the motion was like on the two Australia cruises and the Singapore one? We’ve done loads of cruises and my wife is generally fine, but we did a two week one to NZ from Sydney in 2019 and my wife found the Tasmin sea quite rough and felt poorly for two days. We intend to spend around 5 weeks in Asia/Australia at the end of 2025 with at least 1 cruise thrown in so would be good to know. Ironically we were on the last cruise to go into lockdown (Britannia) whilst in the Caribbean and had to sail back to the U.K. over 10 days instead of flying back and the Atlantic was calm as a pond.