Celebrity Millennium
It's easy to find a good tour guide when you buy a shore excursion from a cruise line. These are professionals at what they do, and if they didn't do it well they just wouldn't last. Sometimes you just know when you've found one who is special. That was Sandy Cuadrado to us. The [...]
Continue reading about Cruise Tour Guide — This ‘Senor’ is Best
We met less than two years ago. If it wasn't love at first sight, it was at least affection. She was a beauty, and she introduced us to all kinds of nice people. A helpful Puerto Rican named Leo…a friendly Colombian named Sandy…an old friend from Little League days…the Panama Canal…and Saravan the Sommelier, the [...]
Continue reading about Once a Millennium, Celebrity Millennium
So much is made of the sizes of cruise ships, isn’t it? Some cruisers think biggest is best. Some think smaller is better because of its intimacy. There is, naturally, no correct answer. In reading about cruise ships, we came across an interesting measurement. Take the size of the ship (measured in “gross tonnage”) and [...]
We were having lunch with our friend and colleague Phil Reimer, author of Ports and Bows, yesterday. Somewhere between the breakfast burrito (yes, some people do have breakfast burritos for lunch but she doesn’t want to advertise it) and the Caesar salad, the subject of the Panama Canal came up (better the Canal than the [...]
This was a tough one to pass up for us. A cruise from Vancouver to San Diego. It’s a wine cruise. Also a Mac cruise. If there are two things that have long been a part of our lives, they are wine and Macs. It gets better. The ship is the Celebrity Millennium, a ship [...]
On our last two Celebrity cruises, Millennium (above) and Eclipse, the food was exceptional. Evidently, a lot of people feel the same way. Why evidently? Because Celebrity — according to cruise writer Fran Golden, while subbing for Gene Sloan at USA Today — is increasing prices for some of its specialty restaurants. In this economy, [...]
On our most recent cruise to South America, somewhere around the equator we were told about cruising the Galapagos Islands. At the risk of showing our ignorance, we first had to learn how to say it, and then how to spell it (we were okay with the “islands” part), and even now there seems to [...]
You won’t find the word “solsticizing” in the dictionary, but you will find it in the cruise world. It’s right there under “Celebrity” and it has become a verb for those of us who write about cruise ships. By this time next year, Celebrity will have “Solsticized” (it is a mouthful, isn’t it?) three more [...]
Continue reading about Celebrity Word: A Meaning all its Own
The Right Price………………………………………………………….$329 Ship: Carnival Fantasy, Eastern Caribbean, 6 nights Departure: December 3, 2011, from Charleston, SC Ports: Nassau, Freeport, Key West Contact: Carnival Cruise * * * Have you ever wondered why ships don’t spend more time in ports, as in overnight?…We always assumed it was an economic issue, that port taxes for doing [...]
Ship: Norwegian Pearl, 7 days, Seattle to Glacier Bay, Alaska (round trip) Departures: May 15 and selected dates Ports: Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, Victoria Price: Inside staterooms $699 Bonus: Upgrade — Oceanview at $849 upgraded to balcony Contact: Norwegian Cruise Line * * * The world’s most prolific cruise blogger, certainly in terms of word count, [...]