flyingron

23 minutes ago, gnome12 said:

@Gthenewsgirl73 And I suggest that you stay away from a ship that has a large group on board.

I never noticed the odd people having any problem.   We welcomed them into what we were doing.

We've done two Ama cruises:  AmaCello and AmaPrima and are scheduled for a 2025 cruise on the Seine.   It's always been a good time ( though we are with a group that typically gets most of the ship).

I've done two other cruises with Paul Wagner.   I never get tired of listening to him talk on wine (he's also written four non-wine related mystery novels).    The first was the 2019 Rhone River AWS cruise.   We completely filled the AmaCello except for three staterooms but we immediately coopted the occupants of those into our events.     The next one was a non-AWS cruise with Paul in NZ on Azamara Journey.

I've not missed an AWS convention in years.     I don't really have the option now, I'm one of the board members.   So, yes, I'll be in St. Louis and in Winston-Salem after that (which is hard for me to miss as well as I live only an hour away).

On 7/17/2022 at 10:36 AM, pacmom said:

 

so excited, we are booked on a charter on Amaprima. It is the America Wine Society trip, Nuremberg to Luxembourg in April next year.  Just finished 2 ocean ruises and can't wait to be on a river cruise again.

This vinter on this cruise is Barbara Frank. About 45 years ago, DH and I were on  trip to the Finger Lakes region of NY. We stopped to see Dr. Konstantin Frank who had just started a winery.  What a treat to be with one of his descendants on a river cruise. This will be4 our 5th AMA cruise.  Pat

Hi, Pat!   I'm on that cruise as well!

The room "fridge" is a joke.   However, the stewards got us an ice bucket to stick the currently consumed bottle into and kept it stocked with ice for us.

We did the Journey in AUS/NZ right prior to the COVID shutdown.   The internet was unusable.   It was dropping packets continually which is death to getting any traffic through.    All the staff could do is suggest I wasn't set up right (I was) and to offer a partial refund.    I just waited until we were close to shore and used my cell tether.

9 hours ago, Grandma Cruising said:

The patio is our favourite lunch spot too. Did you try the Greek burgers - gorgeous!

Yep, they were great.

I'm mostly a wine drinker, so I decided to wait on the drink packages.   I ended up not getting any.   The well selections were good enough for me most days.

We liked the main dining room, conspiring to get our favorite waiter (Philbert) each night.   We did do a special valentines day dinner in the (if I'm remembering right) Aquafina.    That was extraordinary, as well.   Didn't do the chef's table.    Sometimes  you have to look at what's going on.   The crew on the Journey we were on were obviously heavily Indian, so we didn't miss Indian night in Windows.    Also the lunch the day they had the German meal was fabulous.   We ate burgers on the patio at lunch a lot as well.

If you have a NIKON camera, Nikon sells a thing called the FS-1 that will work with their three "micro" lenses.    It will fit on any lens, but I've not found anything for my Canon that will focus close enough.

I brought a cheap dinner jacket (essentially a white tuxedo jacket).   I wore it over just a pair of black pants and a white button down shirt (that I wore other days by themselves) and a bow tie.     People all thought I looked very formal.   I even brought a self-tied bow tie so I could go rat pack and leave it untied and dangling around my neck as the night went on.

Your risk factor is most likely your CURRENT fellow cruisers, not the stuff left over from the last voyage.   It is still unclear how much is actually spread from surface contact as it is.    Most of the outbreaks have been directly attributable to restricted spaces (crowds, ships, airplanes, working in healthcare) with infected people, not coming across it lingering in the wild.

Maybe they should go back to their home ports.   These countries should have some obligation to providing the flags.

13 minutes ago, ed01106 said:

 

 

Perspective, the death toll of Covid-19 in the US has surpassed the death toll of 9/11.

 

 

And all of Desert Storm/Shield included.

With the amount of time cruiseships (with the exception of those that are currently stuck with stranded passengers aboard) are going to sit idle, it's doubtful that there's anything lingering from the last trips.   Despite the headlines, cov-2 duration on surfaces is measured in hours not weeks.   The 17-day statement was not that they found live viruses but they found lingering RNA pieces (which is not alive or a threat).     A bigger issue is more conventional mold and the like from sitting idle.

Most cruise lines have a sanitizing plan just because of prior problems like norovirus.

Here are some photos from the tour I booked direct with the Art Deco Trust there...   One of the cheaper and best excursions we did on the cruise.



 

What I hand't expected was the number of our friends who treat us as pariahs having just returned from a vacation (we actually got off the ship three weeks ago, but we were driving around Australia in the interim).    Some of my wife's associates got outright nasty that she wouldn't just self quarantine herself for the duration.

It was the next to last day that I found out you got "points" at a lot of the activities toward the Azamara trinkets.   I  would have owned the trivia contests and a few other events if I had known.    It was halfway through the napkin folding class when I realize the two instructors were the dance partners from the evening shows.

Amusingly, I bought a dinner jacket (for those who don't know, it's a white jacket you wear with a normal "informal"...t hat is tuxedo) for white night.    I brought three pint bottles: shampoo, body wash, conditioner.  My wife says, the are green stains on your jacket.   I say, no problem, it's just leaking shampoo.

I never use the provided toiletries anyhow.   If there was an option to not stock my room with them at all I'd select it.     Wall mounted dispensors are annoying and budget-hotel tacky.   The showers are small enough without adding that sort of thing.

Good:   
The stateroom was typical, perhaps even better than average.   There was a decent amount of room of the Veranda.    A good sized table and room to get around it without having to squeeze.     We were in 7078 on the Journey (roughly across from the guest laundry which was more of a convenience than a problem).    I actually had a SMALLER hotel room at the Sydney airport when I went to get a connection.

Food was also above average in both Windows and Discoveries.   I was unsure that Aqualina/Prime C was worth the extra money.    We did splurge on the Valentines Dinner in Aqualina and that was absolutely incredible.   Loved our waiters (Philbert and Yolana) in Discoveries.

Entertainment was fun.    Loved Jessie on the saxophone but sad to hear she was a one sailing fill in.   Azamara Evening with the Wellington Symphony and a local indigenous chorus was neat.    Added to that is that we all got to sing along with the cruise director Danny in the  cavernous cathedral while we waited for the return buses to load.

Drinks on the basic plan for me were OK.   Mostly gin drinks (they seemed to alternate between Beefeaters and Gordons depending on the bar.    The wines in the basic were really inexpensive but some weren't too bad.    The sparkling and rose they had throughout the cruise was solid.   Some of the others I could do with out but some were good.   We were in a wine group so we had plenty of other wine to drink as well.

Our stateroom stewards (Carlos and Russel) bent over backwards to do everything for us.

I did the "Insider's Tour" and that was well worth the $89 or whatever.   Got to see the kitchens, environmental, storerooms, laundry, engine control room, and the bridge (where we were served sparkling wine and a snack and allowed to stay as long as we cared to.

Captain Johannes was always gracious and even had a get together for other (airplane) pilots one afternoon.    Amusingly we ran into him ashore in McLaren Vale about a week after the cruise.

Bad (well, average lets say).
Weather and high seas caused us to lose our trip to the Milford Sound and Tasmania.   But the three additional ports added were neat as well and got to see a few things we wouldn't have seen otherwise like the Giant's House in Akaroa or the opportunity to eat Kuora in Kai Kuora.  We also got  small refund on our accounts that had something to do with the port changes.

Weather also forced the White Night to move into the cabaret.   I was less than impressed with the buffet offered for that.

Ugly:
The internet not only never worked right (I'm not talking slow, I'm talking disfunctional) and there's nobody on board that understands anything about it (other than regurgitating the instructions on how to configure the wifi on your device).   I spent most of my career designing and building internet systems.   Another woman and I were trying to explain to the "IT expert" what the problem was but he lacked any basic knowledge about networking that would have helped diagnose the issue.    The guest services people did give me an unsolicited refund of about half of what I paid for the cruise unlimited plan.

The refrigerators in the rooms are complete jokes.     They won't even hold 20C as near as I can tell and apparently this is just the way they are.    The good news is that the crew kept us stocked with ice to compensate (and even offered up a larger ice bucket).

As I previously pointed out, the information on departure was way inferior to what I've seen elsewhere.

This isn't Azamara's fault, but there were some real petty people on this cruise.    There actually had to be a security intervention in the card room over a dispute involving a jigsaw puzzle and a lesser spat broke out about the positioning of window shades in the dining room during sunset.

We did the Journey in a Veranda room but we were travelling with two couples who had inside rooms.    The layout of the inside stateroom is actually a little nicer than the veranda room since they put the bed on the wall that would have been the windows.   Obviously you lose the square footage of the veranda itself, but otherwise the rooms seem comparable.

As pointed out, there's lots of nice spaces on the ship outside the staterooms and after they rip out the casinos, even more.  Sitting in the "Living Room" looking out the window was one of our favorite hangouts.

In our case in New Zealand they had a lot of buses to shuttle people over to the venue and back.   They staggered people by decks (most were in the dining room eating the specially timed dinners) going out.   On the way back you were supposed to return using the same "group" you came out on.    Our cruise director led us in a sing along of various songs while we waited our turn to get on the bus.    It was kind of fun.