MacMania 7 / Shakespeare at Sea

[chris2x]

I went on a cruise on the Volendam on Holland America on Nov 3-13 to the Half Moon Cay (private island in the Bahamas), Aruba, Curacao, the Panama Canal and Costa Rica. While on the boat I attended both MacMania 7 / Shakespeare at Sea through insightcruises.com.

 

My wife and I have done 2 other cruises before this (Windjammer and Royal Caribbean).

 

We really enjoyed both of these two programs and I thought I would give you a quick synopsis of the program. We actually registered with the Shakespeare at Sea program which was done along with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland Oregon). There were 3 one act live performances, 4 movies and numerous classes about Shakespeare. Before the cruise there was an optional party and by the time we got on the ship we new more people than we did when we got off our last cruise. Because we had a common interest we found the our people in the program (about 170) to be very interesting and got to talk to many of them as they mixed up the seating at dinner each night with other members of the group.

 

I also went to some of the classes for MacMania 7 which was on the same cruise and run by the same people. Richard Dreyfuss was one of the speakers in that program (a big Mac fan) and I had a chance to talk to him very briefly.

 

The way the program works is that it costs an additional fee on top of the cruise and you need to book the cruise through Insight Cruises to get into the sessions. The classes, performances, parties, etc are held when the ship is not in port. So they do not conflict with any shore excursions but give you something to do when the ship is at sea.

 

We both enjoyed the program and thought it really enriched the cruise experience. I am not a big gambler, drinker, shopper, art auction buyer, etc so this was a much more interesting use of the time for me.

 

Insight Cruises has technical cruises, chess cruises as well as a series coming up with Scientific American. The cost for the conference fee is somewhere from $800-1200 on top of the cruise cost per person. For the technical conferences like the MacMania cruise, we talked to a number of the attendees whose company was picking up the conference fees. Sadly, my company would not pick up the conference fees for a Shakespeare cruise . :)

 

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Chris Christensen

Amateur Traveler podcast