navybankerteacher

I had a Stuart cabin steward on NCL once.

Two of my favorite afternoons: up one of those stone-floored, white-walled alleys on Mykonos with a partial view of the harbor, and a cul de sac in Lucca - no choice on the menu, you took what was ready, with wines perfectly paired. (Yeah —- I skipped the shipboard lunch I had already paid for.)

Absolutely -- there are small places with side streets whose bistros can be IT.

Every line I’ve sailed offers this. It sure beats wasting time in laundromats (if offered ) or washing stuff in your sink.

The latest (in my mind unnecessary) “must have”: a multi-pocket shoe bag to hold small things you probably will never need but cannot seem to travel without - made of clear (not “cleave”) plastic so you can see all the junk in it.

Make that two months - tough (and costly) to renew you passport at the last minute if you find it has expired - or to get a birth certificate if you old one has crumbled to dust.

You should have looked harder (or gotten a new travel agent): QM2 round trip from Brooklyn with 2 overnights in Quebec - sailing 9/1 and 10/4; Celebrity Summit from Bayonne with one Quebec overnight 9/8, and 10/6, also at least one MSC from Manhattan. We are going to the Caribbean on QM 2 Dec. 22 - tired of the Caribbean, but more tired of decorating, etc. for Christmas and New Years - too bad the New York market had been largely abandoned to the second rate NCL and Royal Caribbean’s Heffalumps of the Seas. HAL used to offer great options out of NY.

There is really only a slight chance that a hurricane will be anywhere near your cruise’s scheduled course. We are already almost half way through this year’s season and only the third named storm is still way out in the Atlantic. Any embarkation port MIGHT be impacted by a hurricane perhaps three days out of the 183 in the season - the odds are better than 60 to one in your favor on that score. Once you are at sea, the tracks of hurricanes are sufficiently predictable that they are easily avoided. The only identifiable mistakes I can see are: a) Going back to the Caribbean one more time - when you could be doing a back to back TA on QM 2, or something involving Canada and New England; and: 2) Going to the Caribbean in October when the weather in most of the US is great - rather than in the winter when it makes sense to seek warmth.

We always check several sites when planning what days to “shelter in place” on our January stays on St. Maarten. Those five/six ship days dumping 20,000 extras on th3 island require planning.

Vending machines are OK for spitting out a candy bar or a bag of chips - but not how I prefer to buy lunch or dinner.

Right - Blue Star, from Piraeus to Mykonos - was pretty good. I was thinking of US east coast - Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven, cross-Sound ferries from New London and Bridgeport, NYC Battery to Staten Island , Cape May to Lewes —- all pretty dismal

A tangent— I have found that on most ferries it is good to avoid the food served in the “restaurant” — regardless of its location.

Not at all. A major part of the original meaning of being liberal was to be tolerant of differences and to believe that people should be largely free of government direction. This has evolved into a thinking that government should limit certain individual differences in favor of a greater good - which unavoidably seems to require more, rather than less, government direction. Most liberals (in my experience) claim to be less biased than conservatives, (and most conservatives similarly claim that they are less biased); the fact is anyone is likely to be biased in favor of his/her political slant. Someone who self-identifies as an arch-conservative is likely to be heavily biased - just like a self-described screaming liberal.

My earlier post referred to “ship”, which term is rarely, if ever, applied to a ferry. If it is a true “double ender”, it would be fitted with navigation lights (port, starboard, masthead, stern, bow, if appropriate ) which would indicate port, starboard, bow, stern as operating. Staten Island ferries crossing New York harbor, for example, switch ends every time as they prepare to exit the slip. The principle remains: the right side of the ship facing forward is starboard, the left is port —- the only thing which changes is which end is forward. Of course, when a vessel is simply backing (presumably giving appropriate light, horn and flag signals), “forward” does not change.

Interesting thought: could you clarify by describing the sort of non-standard ship where port and starboard would change? Have you some non-standard shoes which vary from right to left (and vice versa) when you walk backwards?