Coral Princess
Mark Lester de Asis laying one of the three commemorative wreaths on Balmoral's Titanic Memorial Cruise on Sunday. The easy thing to do right now is ignore the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, pretending it didn't exist or that it was at least overblown. The bottom line, however, is that people who [...]
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 [...]
The way Fabio Amitrano tells the story, he was walking on the beach on Ischia, the volcanic island where he was born off the coast of Italy. He spotted a young woman, as young men are wont to do, and noticed she was speaking English. “I studied English grammar in school, and there were not [...]
Sitting in rain threatening to be snow, wrapped in warm blankets, sipping hot chocolate and wearing toques to prevent brain matter from freezing is not what Princess had in mind when naming this part of a cruise ship “The Sanctuary.” What could it be a sanctuary from…the North Pole? And based solely on that, what [...]
For Gianfranco Verde, the road from opening for The Beatles to closing the door on a 39-year career on cruise ships has been, well, long and winding. He’s heading into his final contract with Princess, as Hotel General Manager on the Coral Princess. You might have made the (lucky) guess that he’s from Italy, but [...]
It’s not so long ago that when people talked about cruising, the quantity of food was at the top of the list. Not quality…quantity! Things have changed. On our last cruise, aboard the Coral Princess, we noticed the sensible size of dinner portions. Make no mistake…you can still eat as much as you like, but [...]
Continue reading about If You’ve Been Overeating on Cruises…
DENALI, Alaska — It’s true that landing on a glacier that’s part of North America’s highest mountain leaves you speechless. Finding the words to describe it is just as difficult so if this is the shortest blog you’ve ever seen on this site, you’ll know why. Actually, the pictures do tell the story. The eight [...]
ALASKA — It’s been sitting there for 4,000 years or so, since the last Ice Age. It doesn’t move, except for a jiggle here and there from the 800 or so earthquakes there are in Alaska every year. At 20,320 feet, it is the highest mountain in North America. Yet Mount McKinley is treated as [...]
ON THE CORAL PRINCESS — Her name is Boujke Bijlsma and one morning at 6 a.m. she was sitting in her office on the Coral Princess. She looked out the window onto the waters of Alaska and there, swimming furiously, was a moose. She watched for a few seconds, then turned back to her deskwork. [...]
Many moons ago, a young woman named Adele was part of our wedding party. She was from a “taxidermy family” that for years operated a business preparing animals to hang on the walls of family rooms and dens. A few years later, she took her mother to Alaska. It was the first trip for both [...]