It’s entirely possible that Princess now holds the norovirus record. This weekend, the cruise line admitted the number of cases on two of its ships had grown to 499. Saturday, the Crown Princess returned to Fort Lauderdale from the Caribbean with 12% of the people on board suffering from the disease — 364 passengers and [...]
My husband loves cruises and he loves football. On Sunday, he could still get on the Norwegian Epic and watch the Super Bowl with as many as 4,000 other football fans. It is his worst nightmare. Let me tell you tell you something about this football fan, since he is always willing to tell you [...]
Princess is having a photo contest for passengers, and that means the pressure is on in our household. On her, not me. Because my little shutterbug has 18,772 photos on her laptop (as of late yesterday), a huge percentage of them from cruises, and I just know somewhere in there is a winner. When she [...]
As we keep reminding our kids, because nobody else will, we were really ahead of our time as cruising parents. It was a couple of decades ago (exact year not disclosed, to protect revealing exact ages and getting us in exact trouble) and we decided on a family cruise, down the Mexican Riviera. Our sons [...]
On Friday we happened to see our family physician, who has since left with his wife on a Caribbean cruise. Naturally, we were all ears. This week they’re en route to Honduras, Grand Cayman and Mexico, from Fort Lauderdale, and since we’d been in all these places during the past six months we shared some [...]
Let’s clarify one thing about this blog before we begin: It is not about age discrimination. As cruise lines search for entertainment lightning rods to attract passengers to ships, they are reaching further into the…uh, age bag. They are recruiting entertainers of our age, and older. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, it [...]
One last postscript on the cruise-ship accident that nobody wants to read about any more… This wasn’t supposed to be the Costa Concordia’s final cruise, so there are passengers booked on future trips that won’t happen. What happens to them? In addition to probably millions paying in liability to those on the ship, Costa will [...]
Everybody who has been on a cruise ship, and countless people who haven’t, can’t stop talking about the Costa Concordia, as the death toll continues to rise. As always, there are more questions than answers. Some that have crossed our minds over the past few days, in trying to look at the big picture and [...]
One of the allegations surfacing about the captain of the Costa Concordia from its horrific accident is that he may not have been on the bridge, driving the ship. At the risk of sounding like we’re defending the captain, who is being blamed with much more than absentia, the possibility that he would not be [...]
When the starboard side of the Costa Concordia ripped open and listed in the waters off the coast of Italy this weekend, it was more than a wake-up call for cruise lines, captains and crews. If any of us who feel so safe and secure on cruise ships (and we do) needed a wake-up call, [...]