CapnCrews

The ground staff deal with checked luggage. Not carry ons.

Flight Attendants are not measuring bags when you come on to a plane. They're watching to make sure bags end up in an overhead compartment quickly, smoothly, without agitating other passengers. Once they go through with final cross check and close all the overhead bin doors, that will be the end of that discussion.

This is the 3rd biggest reason I cruise.

🙄

Give it time. A few weeks after you get home they’ll stretch back out. Never fails.

Put more bluntly: DON’T use a surge protector. Ship’s electrical systems cannot handle a sudden disruption in power flow because of how they are wired, and how surge protectors are manufacture to work. Your home electricity has power coming through one side of the recepticle, and then it returns via a neutral wire. The surge protector only disrupts the flow of the live side. On a ship, there is current traveling through both sides of a plug. And when one side is disrupted while the other continues to deliver a charge, there is a risk of not only a fire, but a fire anywhere in the ship where the wiring also travels besides just your stateroom. Think of a baby’s cradle on another deck being exposed to fire because you tried to sneak a surge protector through. Power strips without surge protection are fine. Power strips with surge protection are banned. If anyone brings one on board, the rest of the ship should HOPE it gets found and confiscated.

Yeah. If it was pouring outside on an excursion and someone offered me one I would graciously accept. As soon as it stopped raining I would slip it into the nearest plastic recycling bin.

It's a fact that's easily proved. Only a person who has never tasted coffee beans roasted within days of brewing would not understand the dramatic, and unignorable difference. Someone who has, recognizes this fact instantly.

You couldn't choose a quality coffee and stick to an exclusive brand, since all exclusive brands are inferior. The only way to serve the hightest quality bean is to get a purveyer to bring it to the ship at every port, just like how the chef does when he's looking for the highest quality salmon. He waits until he's in port in Juneau. Every port has a local roaster. That's where the good coffee is. Anything that's sealed in a can or sitting on warehouse shelves for weeks before you buy it is garbage.

I was never a fan of franchise coffees. There isn't a lick of difference between those and a bag of 8 O'clock at the corner grocery. But if that's all that's available in a person's community I could see why they might refer to it with superlatives.

I bring a French Press and brew my own coffee with locally roasted single source beans. But you go with that. See you on the Sky in June of 24.

Remember when you were in high school. And you would have crossed the Great Dust Bowl in a 1965 station wagon with no oil cap if it meant you were going to get to see the ocean in California? Never lose your sense of adventure. All anyone can ever tell you is what happened in a single one hour snapshot of their life and no one else's.

Well, if that's the case probably best to stay out of all urban areas and just live in the woods.

Well you could avoid it by getting a flip phone and covering all the camera lenses and microphones on your TVs and computers with black tape. But I agree with your sentiment.

Are you asking whether they can be trusted to sleep in the same stateroom, or whether the cruise line will try to enforce religious morals? If it's the former, at 19 this likely wouldn't be the first time they shared a sleeping quarter. Some parents don't like to hear it but I'm too old to wonder. If it's the latter, I think if the check clears people can sleep wherever they want.

Really? Nylon? Fleece? I mean “fleece” hasn’t meant that it comes from sheep’s wool for over a decade. They’re made from dinosaur sludge like everything else these days. $35 Might be a little steep for what it cost them.

Did you say the same thing to the State Department when they forced you to get your own photo done for your passport?

I’ve bought neither … so far … but I’d rather have to sweep up a little soot than look out across the bridge and 20 meters of bow and expect to ever see a single dolphin.

Even if there were: if you use a smart phone they’re already staring right into your face 24/7.

Find a local roaster in your community you like. Someone who carries beans from the port you like most, (in my case it’s Brazil; the Brazil Cerrado or Brazil Santos beans are exquisite. Chocolaty, nutty, very consistent. But you will decide for yourself your household’s favorite bean once you know a local roaster). Avoid “blends”. Blends are a way for coffee retailer to pour 6 different beans into a silo and not have any source accountability. That means it will taste different every time you brew it. Avoid coffees with cute names that are meaningless, Like New York Bold or Christmas Celebration, rather than just tell you where it came from. The local roaster will sell you coffee by whatever measurement you like that was roasted THAT WEEK, in some cases THAT DAY. And this is the secret to the highest quality coffee you can buy week after week. You’re going to pay $16.00 a pound instead of a $9.00 pound of Star-yuck. But that’s ok because you’re posting in this thread, so you’ve already demonstrated that the quality is worth the extra 6 or 7 dollars to you. Now that you have a local roaster, you will likely want to just keep it whole bean until you are ready tonuse it. But you want this same unsurpassed quality on a cruise. Ask them to grind for you 2 pounds for French Press. That’s the coarsest grind possible. Then bring one of these. A french press, or cafetiere is the coffee you had that time in Rome in the cafe and decided the world would be a wonderul place if your coffee always tasted like this. No electricity in the stateroom is required. Just bring a pot full of hot water from the dispenser in the butfet. Then drop 2 tablespoons of grounds for every cup you intend to make into the cafetierre (you can usually find one up to 12 cups like the one pictured). Fill the hot water. Let it steep a minute or two. Press the grounds down. When the coffee is gone, throw the grounds into the garbage. You will never be the slightest bit curious about what special package the cruise line is offering ever again.

Put the bath mat down and leave the shower curtain open.

Although Movies OVER the Stars sounds like a hoot, too.

Well there won’t be anything typical you can point to because it will only happen once. Spring bookings for Princess 2025 is not an annually ocurring event. In general, though, a season comes on line about 18 months in advance. So start checking end of August, into September 23. They do sometimes throw up their repositioning cruises, transatlantics and mini world tours a couple years in advance.

I suspect the person you are talking to is not actually a qualified web tech who can answer anything having to do with site glitches. They can’t tell you if your browser is incompatible with the web based gui they used to build their page, or walk you through clearing out your cache and cookies (which solves about 80% off all function issues, btw) or can even log in to your account to delete mistakenly created shopping carts and profile changes. Even if the person to whom you are speaking says, “let me get someone who can help you with this” and hands you off to someone else. That person is only passing you off the the person in the next cubicle who us just less busy than she is. They are sales and booking agents. They are not web techs. Most people who know all the little tricks about knowing where to find their stored browser history, or what websites still try to use that awful Flash software, or why buttons are greyed out and so on will likely never post here. It will be mostly the good folks who have all they can do to find their browser icon and remember all of their logon profiles and passwords who will create the weekly new “OMG This Website!!” threads. God luvvem.