squaredancer44
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Posts posted by squaredancer44
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Update on our Baltic cruise in Aug 2014 out of Amsterdam on the Costa Romantica. Had a blast, found caches in every port, except St Petersburg, and met fellow cachers in most. We HAD to take an excursion to get off the boat in Russia. It was well worth it but frustrating to drive right by several cache locations and not be able to stop! We didn't have enough time at any one stop to walk to GZ, hunt, then walk back to catch the bus and with no visa we didn't want to be out on our own!
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Lots of good discussion here. This is my $0.02 worth :-) My wife and I have cached on all of our cruises. In many cases it's better than a shore excursion! We've only cruised the Caribbean and Alaska so far, the Baltic is coming up 26 Aug 2014. My most fun caching and cruising was in Alaska. Lots of caches within easy walking distance of the ports. Next best was Cozumel, safe walking and plenty of caches in town near the port. Our last trip to the eastern carib got us hooked up with another caching family and that was loads of fun. I used the Roll Call threads to find a fellow cacher(s). The idea of arranging a meetup via the CD is a good idea. The suggestion to research caches in your ports of call is a good one. I've already got mine picked out for our Baltic ports! They're loaded on my iPad and I'll have my trusty Garmin GPSr with me, cache locations etc already loaded. Ports vary widely in terms of cache density with larger cities naturally having the most and remote rural locations few if any. One idea worth looking into is an 'event cache'. You would need to arrange it at least two weeks in advance but I ran across two of these during our eastern carib cruise. Unfortunately neither was for the day we were in port :-( but it might be a good way to meet some local cachers. The most fun ever was running into some cachers from another ship while in Alaska. We spotted a couple of suspicious looking characters poking around a phone booth and some electrical boxes. Turns out they were cachers looking for a brand new cache that had been placed after I loaded my caches. We joined them in the hunt and found the nasty little creature.
anyone? Ramada Miami Springs/Miami International Airport
in Florida Departures
Posted
Yes. We stayed there 27 Nov 2016. Other than the ferocious traffic on 36th St out front, it was ok. The staff were friendly and accommodating and the room was clean and quiet. We needed to drive about a mile north to find a corner drugstore (Walgreens I think) and then walked over to a delightful little Cuban restaurant (no English spoken) for a light supper. Very friendly and our few words of Spanish along with the waitress's few words of English did the trick. Our walking experience in this neighborhood was no worse than any other large city urban area and much better than a recent stay in Seattle (spooky). We were able to leave our car during the cruise for a nominal fee (I think it was $6/night). The most dangerous part of the stay IMHO was pulling out of the parking lot onto 36th St.
My one beef with the stay was the shuttle service. The hotel uses 'system shuttle miami' (systemshuttle.com) for their shuttle service. It was $10pp one way. The trip TO the ship was uneventful but the return was another story. After a half hour of trying to reach someone at the pickup number we gave up and took a taxi. The guy at the system shuttle desk back at the hotel was totally unconcerned and pretty much ignored us as we complained.
If you stay here, my suggestion is to make other arrangements for transportation to and from the cruise terminal.
Oh, and NO we were not 'packing heat' (armed) at any time! :-)