And so it begins Mariner April 2 Barcelona to Istanbul

[hondorner]

Re: scaling on the fly...I just opened an account with dropshots.com which automatically scales pix as they are uploaded. I have just started playing with it and haven't uploaded any cruise pix yet, but here's a photo from Zion National Park to show an example:

 

 

The technique is the same as outlined by Mimi -- find the photo on dropshots.com under your account name, right click and then click on "copy image location" which puts the URL on your clipboard, then click the "insert image" icon in the reply menu and paste (^v) the clipboard info. Voila!

 

The above photo was on my hard drive as a 3264 x 1952 pixel monster which took up 1.72 megabytes; dropshots resized it to 800x478, using 140 kilobytes. To verify, right click the above image, then click on "View Image Info".

 

dropshots.com is free up to a limit. I already forget what that limit is, but I plan to upgrade to the paid version for unlimited photos and videos up to 10 minutes. It's $4.95 per month, but they're having a limited time Lifetime upgrade to full unlimited for $99. Pays for itself in less than two years. I have no connection to dropshots.com.

[Wendy The Wanderer]

Okay, I'll try again. Smugmug allows you to view in different sizes, this is small:

 

 

Oh, it worked! Yeah!!! Guess I've been doing it wrong all along, trying to post the whole URL instead of doing "copy image location". Thanks Don!

[cruiserj12]

I hope all of you had a great cruise. I will be cruising on the Mariner in July and wanted to know if any of you noticed the sewage smell on the ship that has been reported by some on various threads. I will be staying in cabin 743. Any tips would be helpful. Thanks.

[nana541]

Last week on Deck 7 you could not get any further back than that back corner (with my Butler Ram in Cabin 781 :).... sewer smell? No! Stinky harbors once In a while when docked, you bet...and while docked some harbors had diesel smell...none of this came from Mariner but rather the product of working commercial harbors.

So when you get a whif of something stinky (not often) grab for a glass of wine and just be grateful you are on a beautiful ship and enjoy!

 

No seriously, rarely did we smell anything funky but it did happen on occausion while docked...now let this worry go away and enjoy your upcoming cruise :)

[RachelG]

As you may recall, I was very worried about the possibilities of bad smells as we were in 746 in January and the smells had been reported right before that cruise. I am happy to say that whatever the problem was had been fixed before we boarded and stayed fixed.

Now in port a couple of times, we did have a few funky smells, but they were from the port, not Mariner!

[cruiserj12]

Nana and Rachel, thank you so much for replying and letting me know. I am a worrier and this has been causing me much stress about the trip. Now I can sit back and look forward to the awesome trip. I enjoyed reading all of your posts in this thread, as I said before, this is our first cruise with RSSC and it sounds like it will surpass our initial expectations.

[Mr Rumor]

I'm looking forward to poring over every page of Wes' splendid shipboard account of his Voyager cruise. Just now I ogled his Santorini photos to see what we missed. . . a lot!

 

This is how close we got to the fabled isle (hello Santorini, bye Santorini). Just glad I made it on deck to snap a few shots. It wasn't until we showed up in the Constellation Theater with our tickets that we learned the visit had been cancelled due to high swells. We had somehow missed the announcement.

 

 

I also loved Wes' photos of Ephesus. A visit to the Terrace Houses is a must must must! I've worked in art licensing for years and have done a lot of puzzle work. At the Terrace Houses I spied an assortment of jigsaw puzzle challenges for the ages:

 

[Travelcat2]

Amazing photo of Santorini. Although we took a similiar picture while it was dark (making the top of the mountain look like diamonds), it's great to see it from the ship during the day.:)

[Aloha 1]

We were on Celebrity Silhouette this past August. The day we tendered in to Santorini, I half expected them to cancel the shore excursions. My wife and I are seasoned seafarers, but there were many passengers that had a lot of trouble navigating the short hop from ship to tender. It was well worth the effort. My only regret was that the ruins of Acrotiri are still closed.

 

HISTORY LESSON: It is now commonly held that the destruction of Thera (Santorini), in or around 1350 BCE, by the massive eruption of the central volcano, was the cause of the destruction of Minoan Crete. The tsunami has been estimated to have hit hit Crete at an altitude of at least 65 feet above sea level and thereby destroying most of the southern cities and towns. Acrotiri, was a population center on Thera (Santorini) that was buried under ash a la Pompei'i in Italy. It literally destroyed the dominant civilization in the eastern med and led to the rise of Agememnon of Troy fame on mainland Greece. There are those who think that this volcanic explosion gave rise to Plato's story of Atlantis. The volcano is still active and the caldera is growing again, although not dangerous for the next couple hundred years.When you go to Santorini, you're ship is literally anchoring in the center of the caldera. All the little islands you see around you used to be one island.