Dan

We use a garment bag and a suitcase. We also pack where it fits.

And here I thought The American Dream was having a job and making a comfortable life for yourself and your family. Winning the lottery is The Canadian Dream LOL, and ours are tax free LOL.

Since you are Canadian, the current law is that the persion who commissions a professional portrait owns the copyright to it. This will be changed under the new law that the photographer will own the copyright. Whether the Walmarts and other companies know this law or not, who knows.

Cool. 30% refund sounds like a nice deposit on another cruise, maybe a full 7 day to celebrate 40.5 years LOL.

I won't say the customer service was bad, from the front line folks. They were actually pretty decent to deal with. I just don't think the folks higher up the chain were providing their contact folks with info fast enough. We were to sail 9-15 from New York. The news on the afternoon of 9-11 pretty much made it clear that we wouldn't be getting into NYC 4 days later. I gave Carnival a day to work things out, then started calling them. I know 9-15 sailings weren't the immediate worry for Carnival brass, since they had the Spirit docking in Vancouver either on the 11th or 12th with no way to get people out of there (flights all grounded). But, I would have thought figuring out what to do with a ship with 3400 people set to return to NYC in a couple days would have been the next up on their list. I remember talking with a guy from Carnival on Thursday afternoon (13th), and saying "You guys have to know where that ship is going by now. It's not going to New York. Everyone knows this." All he could say was his personal opinion that it would likely be Boston, but he had nothing official yet. Finally, the afternoon of the 14th, they make it official that the ship was going to Boston. Great, now how to get there, with my Buffalo-Newark flight not being much good at that point, especially since Newark was still closed. I ask about cancellation options. Carnival says they will give us a credit good for 18 months. Not much use since my wife is just shy of 6 months pregnant, and we wouldn't be leaving the twins that soon LOL. So we decide to jump in the car and start driving. Oh well, the flights were only $100 per person anyway. If Newark hadn't opened back up Saturday morning, we would have got a refund, but since our flight did in fact operate, we were stuck. Now, it wasn't all bad. Carnival did give us $200 per person shipboard credit, 100 for the ship being moved to Boston, and another 100 for us getting ourselves to the ship, instead of using their shuttle bus from NYC. So that covered the unused flights, gas, and parking in Boston.

When I had to deal with Carnival after 9-11, I felt they were sincerely reading a script LOL. And a short one at that.

RCI has announced that the Rhapsody won't come back into Galveston until Monday at the earliest (normally Sunday). Carnival says they *may* have further info on Conquest on Thursday afternoon.

So far on CNN, they are predicting Rita heading straight to Galveston, but they do emphasize it is too soon to tell. We are still 3 full days until the storm is expected to come ashore. They are saying part of depends on the high pressure system over the gulf right now, and how quickly it moves east. If it stays stationary, or moves slowly, the storm will likely be pushed south. If the high moves fast, the storm could turn back towards NOLA. I think, and this is just me guessing here, but if the storm moves south, this has the most opportunity to delay Sunday cruises from Galveston, since the ships will detour further away. If the storm goes east, this will likely mean everything will work out fine for the cruises, but the consequences of that likely mean NOLA under water again, so I think cruisers will gladly sacrifice a day or 2 for that not to happen.

Just keep an eye on carnival.com for storm updates. If the storm drags across the Gulf, they will either leave the current sailing out longer, and shorten yours, or end the current one early to get people out of the way, put the ship back to sea to ride out the storm, and come back to get you guys later when weather permits. Usually people make out OK with some sort of compensation in these situations. Current projections show the storm coming right at Houston on Saturday, so I wouldn't expect to fly there that day. What airline are you flying on? You should also keep an eye on their website for any storm related info. I think it's more likely they will tell you to stay home if they aren't flying into Texas that day, instead of getting you in their system and having to look after you if you are stranded along the way. But, with hurricanes being how they are, Houston might be open for business again later in the day

The internet is mostly recreation for me. Not something I need, but something I enjoy spending time doing, along with karaoke and golf LOL. I probably won't decide until we board whether I'll use the net or not, but chaces are I will, just to pop in here and say hi. Of course, posting from a ship isn't as much a novelty now as it was when we went on our last cruise. But, on that cruise, being days after 9-11, people booked on the sailings immediately after ours were hungry for information about what we knew was going to happen to their trips, so I was answering a lot of questions too. I'm not a "get away from it all" type of person. I'm away from work, and there is zero chance I'll see one of my company's trucks in Mexico, so that's as away from it as I need to be. I wouldn't be upset if there was no TV news or internet on board though. I also don't begrudge people that bring their laptops with them on a cruise, and sit out by the pool typing away. I mean, if you have to take a "working vacation" what better place to do it? Some people simply have jobs they can't check out of for a week or more. Those poolside laptop uisers may not even be working. They could be setting a nice webpage of their cruise, as it happens, or even be a Crazie typing out the mother of all cruise reviews LOL.

Of course it will cost extra. This is Carnival after all.

Hmm, must be how it is coded. I used teh clock feature on the right side of the page here, and it gave me code that works. I used what I got from some other link which I can't even find now, and it doesn't display here, but does at buggie and critic. Go figure. Well now, you guys will know when you'll have a week of peace from me now, too LOL.

I know mine works on other boards, but it never did here for some reason.

In about 130 days. We fly to LAX on Jan 20, and sail the next day. I tried to put the countdown on here when we booked, but it never showed up.

From what I've gathered, there won't be any of the normal shipboard activities going on. They don't say anywhere that it will be relief workers living on board, which is a common rumour going around right now, and given that 2 of the 3 ships are going to be based in Galveston, it makes it more likely it will be used as "refugee" housing. The Holiday is going to stay in Mobile, where it was sailing anyway. After the 6 month charter period, the 3 ships are supposed to get an "extensive" refurbishment.

RCI also sailed out of NOLA, although I'm not sure if that was year round, or seasonal. Also, Princess was supposed to do a couple sailings from there, but I can't remember when. Sometime in the winter I think.

They are fortunate that the Conquest was already shceduled for a drydock. I feel bad for the people who drove to NOLA for that cruise and now their cars are sitting there, and they can't get to them. They haven't come out and said what the Conquest will be doing when it comes out of drydock. Likely they will go to Galveston since that will be an easier port to get people to than, say Mobile. At least they seem to have more information now for near-term cruisers than they did in the days following 9-11. They were still telling us up to the morning of the 14th we were sailing from New York. Even when they finally told us about the move to Boston, they told me the port of calls were the same, just the home port was different. When I told them the ship was scheduled to call in Boston the day after sailing and "Surely the ship isn't going to set sail from Boston on Saturday, and call there Sunday, right" they said all ports were the same as scheduled LOL. Only when we boarded did we know the new schedule.

Haven't done a Christmas cruise yet. Not sure if we will. First off, I've only had my job for 18 years, so that isn't enough seniority to get Christmas vacation yet LOL. Plus, family time is important to my wife at Christmas, so as long as her parents are still around, I doubt we'll be travelling at Christmas.

I'm sure if you take small US bills, you will be fine. Just be prepared to pay whole dollars for things, unless you want a pocket full of local small change.

We've been lucky with our TA, too. I can bounce all sorts of ideas I come up with off her, and she'll talk to me straight about whether it's a good idea or not. When we were planning this next cruise, we were planning it with people we met on a cruise 6 years ago, who live in Kentucky. They ended up booking through our TA. Then a month ago, they tell us they have friends who wanted to come, and they ended up booking with our TA as well. I wouldn't use the cruise line myself. I have a picture in my mind (just like Air Canada's call centre) of an office in India, where the people only know the name of the company because they have a sign on their cubicle saying who they work for today. They have a list of standard answers to popular questions, but can't really offer up anything that might be useful.

Honestly, I wouldn't know what a good price is in your area. Prices seem to fluctuate between areas, and that's not taking into account the exchange rate from Canada. The Fuji Finepix A345 that sailingrose mentioned above looks like a very nice camera, at $179 at Best Buy.. You can tack on a 128mb XD memory card for another $27, or you can probably beat that at Costco.

Look for something in the 4 megapixel range, (or 3 if it's a generally better camera). Optical zoom trumps digital zoom. 256 and 512 mb SD memory cards are cheap now, and each will hold hundreds of pics. Nikon are one of the top names in digital cameras, but might be above your price range. You won't go wrong with Fuji or Kodak either. jbond will have lots of good info on this topic when he reads it.

If you were to a one way cruise out of Vancouver, you might be able to arrange round trip air on Westjet or Air Canada to Vanouver, and a one way on Harmony from Hawaii to Vancouver on the way home. You'd just have to time it out so that you can get from your Harmony flight to your Westjet flight in Vancouver on the way home. I just did a sample booking on Air Canada using their multi-city tool, and it came out to about $1200 per person. Now, this was using the dates for this year's cruise, so being so late, there aren't any cheap seats left. Booking far in advance is neccesary from Honolulu to Vancouver, since this flight is actually a Sydney Australia-Vancouver flight that picks up passengers in Hawaii. If you were to book as far in advance as possible, you'd get cheaper air than that.

There are also a few one way cruises on Carnival and Royal Caribbean that go to Hawaii from Vancouver. One way cruises to/from Hawaii have to start or end in Mexico or Canada, unless it's on one of NCL's American registered ships. The round trips from California have to stop in Mexico to satisfy the foreign port call requirement. For a pricing example, on Royal Caribbean's website, the Sept 24, 2006 11 night cruise from Van-Hawaii is about $1700 CDN for an inside, or $2200 for a balcony. From the ones I looked at, I'd give a serious look at the 15 day round trip Island Princess cruises out of LA. Not sure how they price out, but it likely will be higher than the above prices, considering it's 4 days longer. But also look at airfare options when looking at these types of cruises. Doing a one way cruise to Hawaii is going to mean one way air back

The service we are planning to use in LA is www.supershuttle.com and they operate in Miami area as well. You can give their Miami office a call at (305) 871-2100 and ask how much to pick you up from FLL and take you to the hotel. It's probably similar to what you have already found. If you take the shared ride, or the exclusive use, it's still going to be a lot cheaper than taking 2 taxis that far. I recall about 10 years ago, the approximate taxi fare from FLL to MIA was about 50 bucks, so going even further to the port would probably push you to 80 bucks or so in today's money.