Sunflower & The Scientist

Service dogs and “emotional support” dogs are radically different. We had a service dog for our daughter who was a quad on a ventilator. The dog was highly trained, tested and retested, and we had to agree to strict guidelines in order to receive the dog. Legally the dog had to provide three services to be a service dog. She was a working dog, she did not socialize with other people, and we had to constantly remind people that she was not a pet and to not disturb her from doing her job. (No worries, she got plenty of love and cuddles from us when she was off duty.) Our dog had a lot of air miles on her, and never once did we receive anything but compliments on how amazing she was. She was bathed and groomed and kept very clean, but she was a dog, she shed. I would never have taken her on a cruise. It in my opinion as a service dog owner,it is a totally inappropriate place for a service dog…with the exception of a person who relies on their service dog for safety reasons such as someone who is visually impaired. It is totally unacceptable for dogs to be sitting on furniture, being fed from the table, or held in a lap (unless it is doing a task…but that would be a pretty unheard of task). The concept of emotional support dogs has been very disturbing to us as we had to put up with them barking at our dog as she worked. We encountered people who told us they were going to buy a vest off amazon and start saying their dog was a service dog. We are very disturbed as we have seen the explosion of “emotional support” animals. They give true service dogs a bad reputation…don’t even get me started. My husband is currently on a chat with Viking regarding this. If anyone has any ideas of what else we can do, or who to contact, what to say….whatever, please post it here. We all need to become involved in getting this stopped because I believe there will be more and more people seeing this and then doing it.

Thanks so much Heidi13! That is very helpful and we can have a better idea of what we can do.

We are getting ready to book excursions soon and are wondering which ports are ones we can just walk off in an interesting area to walk around. We enjoy taking an excursion but also walking off the ship and exploring on our own. I've heard Liverpool is a good port for that.

There isn't??? We are leaning forward to look through our neighbor's window? Seems like if everyone pays the same amount (through Viking) everyone should get the same quality view.

Thanks so much for your helpful information. How about some tips for the cruise?

Thank you fruitmachine! I hoped that would be the case. We cannot wait to enjoy your beautiful Scotland.

We are on BIE for July and are wondering if anyone knows (can those of you in the UK help us out with this) when the Stone of Destiny will be returned to Edinburgh Castle after the coronation? We would hate to miss seeing it.

I understand the playing off tempo thing, but how does one play the piano "flat"? I've heard my share of singers who are flat and that's awful, but unless the piano is not tuned correctly, it's beyond me as a piano teacher how a person can play a piano flat.

We've cruised HAL as well. If you don't mind casinos, and children, HAL may be where you are happiest. Personally we found HAL to be older more outdated ships (just our opinion, no flames please) We did not care for the staterooms. We will pay more for the newer, fresh super clean appearance of Viking, and we won't sale again with casinos and children unless we have to. (We like children, just not in the room next to ours, or running back and forth down the hall.)

Please don't get me wrong, I am not in any way promoting men wearing baseball caps in restaurants...I was responding to the person who said that there were men who needed to wear them due to medical needs. As a woman who needs to wear a hat or wig due to cancer, I am sensitive to men who also find themselves in this position. Not all cancer patients wear hats due to chemo, (male or female should not be criticized for wearing hats for chemo either) some like myself, must wear them because of the cancer itself. On our last cruise I met a male cancer patient in that situation, so I know that occasionally (not to be mistaken with the norm) there are individuals on Viking who are in that category. In my over two years as a face and skull cancer patient, I have never seen or heard of a medical head covering. If there is such a thing, I would want to spare the individual the embarrassment of wearing a medical device on their head in a restaurant. It's embarrassing enough just having to wear a hat or a wig all the time. My point is....this is NOT the norm, but we need to give grace where grace is deserved. For the rest of the people who weren't raised with good manners, I do not have any sympathy, take your hat off and keep your bathrobe in your stateroom where it belongs.

Yes, everything I have seen is shelf stable. We always ask for skim milk with meals, and it's shelf stable as well. I don't think fresh milk is practical for them to use. Also on Orion in the Living Room where we always got our coffee, when you asked for a vanilla latte they used milk and straight vanilla, not vanilla syrup. It was not that way on Octantis.

Squawkman is correct....cancer, and not just due to hair loss.

Thanks for this information....excellent idea.

We typically are at the end of our cruise with local currency and trying to spend it quickly because we don't want to go home and exchange it. We aren't really shoppers abroad except if we are looking for something specifically. We don't eat in restaurants very often, but we always do local coffee. However, in the UK we are likely to want to try some local food. We've got a cruise down the Rhine in 2024 and Italy in 2025, and we will be trying more local foods on those cruises.

We are on British Isle Explorer this summer and haven't traveled outside of the US and Canada since COVID...so I am thinking through what we need use cash for and what we need to use a card for. I see what you are saying about small shops and vendors. Anyone have advice on which is going to be better for restaurants?

Fellow grits lover, but I have not seen them on Viking. I have seen them on other cruise lines. Sometimes I have seen polenta. I ordered it at Manfredi's once, but it wasn't typical polenta and in something like a cube shape and didn't taste like polenta at all.

Wow...thanks for the info on sub-lingual Benadryl. We cannot get that in the US. Have you had any issues getting it back into the US?

THANKS!!!! I appreciate that.

Care to share that recipe with the rest of us....I'd love to make them!

I would work through Viking rather than contacting the embassy. Viking is familiar with what to do and unless they tell you to contact the embassy, you are much safer working through Viking.

We found the same thing.....

I wondered this same thing....what about things that are wash and hang dry. Can you take them out in-between? I can't even imagine trying to dry jeans in one of those. Perhaps they will start including clothes drying racks we can set up in our stateroom to dry our laundry🤣....this is modern technology at it's best.

I too hope they do not make drinks directly into passengers cups, I'm surprised to hear they ever did that as that would be a health concern. We always pour the paper cups into our insulated containers. If we are using the machine sometimes it takes a few cups to fill our containers. This is commonly done and we saw the same people doing this every morning. As someone said, if you do not want to use paper products, you can have it made in a "real" cup and transfer it into your container. At times we have experienced a shortage of the paper cups and had to go looking for them.

In my opinion, no worries about bringing this topic up! I do a lot of laundry on board and really would have been caught off guard if I found the combo units. So thanks for bringing this to our attention!

We used them on Octantis, they are just like the laundry on oceans.