Jan115

Good article Jan. It's always nice to have something to look forward too, in addition to the good memories from your last trip.

Sounds like a good way to go from the "Post-Cruise Blues" to the "Pre-Cruise WHOO-HOOS"!!!

Woohoo! I'm dancing with ya, Jan! You know I'm on Grand Princess for Hawaii and Mexico this Christmas/New Year's! Oh yeah, a brotha will be following along to hear of how she treated ya in Alaska! I'm getting pumped for YOUR cruise! Yay!
P.S. I hope they give me a greeting like that! Now THAT's truly worthy of the pre-cruise dance! Dance on, girl! :)

I've packed ginger or bonine on every cruise. So far (knock on wood), I've never needed it, but it's good to be prepared. Thanks so much for reading!

I hope this catches on, and at an affordable rate. My wife likes to go to N.Y. twice (at least) a year to visit family and friends. I wouldn't mind doing a 3 to 5 day cruise while she's gone!!

Good to see some lines trying to accommodate single cruisers. Maybe it will catch on.
Now, for goodness sake, tell Crazie Bear to get off that railing before she falls in!!!

Exactly! And this is especially true for families and kids with cell phones, and I mention this from experience. I monitored my own phone and data usage, but forgot to educate my daughter in the art of cell phone usage on a cruise ship, and was hit with an enormous phone bill. You live and learn!

Good add-ons, Tim - thanks! Yes, I used to have several of the plastic barware, too. They got shuffled around the house so many times when cleaning and one day finally landed in the trash recycle bin - and I'm not sure they're recyclable - so they are probably drifting in the landfill somewhere. Needless to say, I don't waste space in my luggage for them anymore.

Oh, how cool, Jan! Oh, I know exactly where you were! Fell's Point is one of my favorite places to hang here!
I am very familiar with that annual conference held here. I see those folks around the harbor and it looks like they have a great time!
And seriously - it stands! When you're back in Baltimore, let me know - I'll show why they call us Charm City!

That was a bummer, Jan...missing the tour boat. On our last few cruises we have just been going with tour people who are waiting at the port when the ship arrives...we've had good luck with that...but we are very careful that they can speak English, and also make sure we are in agreement on the price before we leave.

Loved your article Jan...loved the pictures!

Thanks, Shon! I really enjoyed that. I have no excuse for not cruising from Baltimore. It's much cheaper and quicker to fly to BWI than MIA for me, and if I really wanted to, I could do the 9-hour drive. Grandeur looks lovely, and I am just going to have to hop a jet and come down!

Good post Jan. I have seen this too many times in the past on cruises to blow it off!! And, I have posted on it often. The statement "it's my vacation, I paid for it" just shows the self-centered nature of many (not all) parents. You may have paid for your vacation, but you did not pay for mine. Maybe I don't find the games of your kids pressing all the buttons on the lift, sitting and blocking the stairs or running up and down the hallways screaming to be amusing. When we brought our niece (she was 12 at the time) on the Carnival Pride with us, she was so well behaved because we discussed with her pre-cruise the importance of respecting the other passengers right to the vacation THEY paid for. I've actually had little "Rug Rats" curse at me when I asked them to move from blocking access to the stairs!! They were about 12 or 15 years old!!! No parents or adult guardians to be found anywhere. And one more thing to parents bringing their kids on a cruise, the cruise line staff are NOT your personal babysitters. Please don't board the ship on which I PAID for MY cruise and just cut your kids loose as if the ship was their personal playground!!!

I totally agree. All parents believe their kids are adorable, but they have to realize that they are not adorable to everyone. The running and screaming that you can ignore is like fingernails scraping on a chalk board to someone else. You don't want to be that group that enters a room and people roll their eyes and say "oh no, here they come."

Looking forward to it. Have a great cruise!

Or that new liquid Crystal light!! Even easier, needs no refrideration, and great flavors!!

To expand on the idea of matching yourself to an appropriate sailing, check out my new article, hot off the press: "Choosing the Best Cruise for YOU." http://www.cruisecrazies.com/index.html/_/cruise-articles/choosing-the-best-cruise-for-you-r829

Hey Jan, thanks for starting this new blog.
These are excellent tips that I think many often forget. Though we are on vacation and expect everything to be 100% correct every time, those working tireless hours to keep us satisfied are only human! It's important, like you said, to not let those little things affect your overall cruise experience - Especially as a first time cruiser.
Even something more extreme such as rough seas....maybe your cruise had some rough weather and you felt it. What season was it? Were you on a large or small ship? Take those points into consideration (as well as others), as that doesn't mean you'll feel the rough seas on every future cruise!

Jerry was entered in the Knobby Knees contest and WON!! They called him Cliff Clavin. All the men on stage had shorts on. Not my husband. He is known for wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts. So, he rolls his pants up to his thighs. Guess it was one of these where you had to be there ...
Then there was the Hawaii cruise where we all learned Hula. The night of our stage performance, we did not know that the men would be dressed in coconut tops, wigs and grass skirts. They came out to do "their number" and ALL of the men had their wigs on backwards. We still laugh about this one.

When my wife and I were married (10 years ago in June) my in-laws happened to have a cruise scheduled one week after our wedding. So they generously purchased a cabin for us for our honeymoon. The embarrassment came when my wife and I landed ourselves on the newlywed game show. From the moment my new wife started planning our audition, I knew that my new in-laws would never look at me the same again. But I figured that if I'm going down it might as well be in a blaze of glory. So the peak of my embarrassment came when the other husbands and I were brought back to the stage to try to match our wives answers and cruise director pressing me for details all the way gets me to explain to the entire ship and my in-laws where the "wildest place my wife and I had ever made whoopee" was. And lets just say it wasn't on the ship during our honeymoon. Worst part is we didn't even win. My embarrassment continued to a lesser degree as I become semi-famous for the rest of the cruise, with people addressing me by nicknames like "hamburger helper" which was how I described my wife's cooking and matched her answer by the way, and "Woody" for "Woody Wood Pecker" the cartoon character she chose to describe me in the morning, we got that one right too. Overall, I embraced it all and had a great time.

Thanks, Tim. The newsfeed has stopped because there's nothing to report. Nobody got seriously maimed or killed, and that won't sell newspapers or gather ratings. I also agree that this incident will fade into cruise accident history. First-time cruisers onboard the Triumph have the most to lose because they have nothing to compare it to. They will need some serious convincing by people like us to try another cruise!

Glad to hear you had such a great time, Shon. You seem like a fun guy to have around on a cruise!

Dance the night away and have a great cruise!

Congratulations on your new blog, Sarge!
As you know, I am sailing on the same ship in October and look forward to reading about your experience. In the meantime, it'll be very interesting for our readers to compare our notes as we blog our individual takes on the ship, don't you think? A Battle of the Brilliance Blogs, I call it - LOL!

I like it - "Land of the Lost". Exactly how I feel when venturing into new cruise territory.