Vacations On A Ship

Romantic cruises are not just for honeymoons any more.

You can chose to get married on board a Carnival ship or on land during one of the destinations during the cruise.

The shipboard weddings include traditional wedding items like bridal bouquet, sparkling wine, wedding cake, and optional photography service.

From that base point, you can customize your wedding cruise to create your dream wedding and honeymoon.

The on land weddings includes similar base features plus round trip transfers for the bride and groom. Land weddings are performed by a local official.

Carnival also provides a Honeymoon Registry where your friends and family can pay for various aspects of your dream honeymoon cruise like spa treatments, photos, land excursions, and food in the ships specialty restaurants.

For more information on , contact Carnival by visiting their website.

The Norwegian Gem is the newest ship in the Norwegian Cruise Line Fleet.

Like all of the Norwegian ships, the Norwegian Gem delivers Freestyle Cruising which basically means that you are not tied to the traditional dinner schedules that a lot of other cruise lines use.

The Norwegian Gem has 12 different restaurants which serve a wide variety of foods including Tex Mex, French, Mediterranean, Asian, steakhouse and pizza. All of the restaurants are open between 5:30pm and midnight. You will never have to choose between eating a good dinner or participating in one of the ships many activities since you can just move dinner early or later as needed.

Also, there is no formal dress code for any of the meals. If you want to wear the tuxedo you brought, feel free. If you want to wear your khaki pants, that’s fine too.

The Norwegian Gem also has a bowling alley for a fun, unique experience at sea. They boast a casino with some of the best gaming rewards to be found on any ship. Your points can be used to pay for anything on your current cruise, your final bill, or a future cruise.

You will also find all of the swimming pools, spas, workout equipment, bars and lounges that are the mainstay on all of the large cruise ships these days.

The Norwegian Gem is currently departing from New York in March and traveling to Cape Canaveral, Florida; Great Stirrup Cay, Bahamas; Nassau, Bahamas; Freeport, Bahamas; New York, New York on a 7-night Bahamas cruise.

After sorting through all of your cruise options and finally deciding on a destination and date, you need to make sure that you have all of the things that you need for the trip.

In addition to passports and confirmation numbers, you are also going to need some sunglasses, warm weather clothes, towels, and books.

I am starting to put together a little store front where you can find all of these travel necessities for your cruise in one place.

A couple of the things that I wish that I had spent a little more time shopping for when I went on my last cruise are fiction books, luggage and sunglasses.

I wish that I had brought more fluff books. The few books that I brought were a little heavier than I really wanted to spend time focusing on.

We were pretty well set on big luggage but I wish we would have picked up a couple good backpacks for the day trips.

And you can never have too many pair of sunglasses. I had to buy a couple on the ship because I had a tendency to accidentally leave them at the restaurants in the countries we visited.

If there are any categories of items that you think I should add to the store, please leave a comment and I will try to get it added. While you are waiting for me to add the category, please use the search box to see if what you are looking for is available but just not added to the sidebar yet.

The Disney Cruise ship Disney Wonder will be retiring the musical play they perform during the cruise.

Starting in April, passengers will no longer see Hercules The Muse-ical. Plans are in place to start performing Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story as a musical instead.

The stage will be filled with a giant Mr. Potato Heads, piggy bank, and tyrannosaurus in life size puppets.

The main characters like Buzz, Woody and Bo Peep will be played by real actors.

My kids, like most kids, are definitely bigger fans of Toy Story than Hercules so the change is sure to excite kids and parents alike.

After you have booked and paid for your next cruise vacation, check to see how much of the check-in paperwork you can fill out in advance.

Most of the cruise ships have an online form that will let you fill in information about your passport, credit card that you want to use for expenses while on the ship and all the other information that you traditionally had to stand in line to wait to fill out before boarding.

Once you submit the information, you can print out a boarding pass. With that advance boarding pass, you can walk up to a special line for people that filled out the forms in advance. These lines move much quicker meaning that you spend less time waiting in yet another line and more time enjoying the ship.

If you are not comfortable providing that information online, you can also request that they mail you paper copies of the forms to fill out and mail back in advance.

American Idol fever is still sweeping the nation.

For those of you who think you might be the next big singing sensation and are already planning a cruise this fall, you should look into one of the 5 Royal Caribbean cruises that will be sailing with an American Idol theme with the passengers playing the part of the singers.

The cruises will take place between November 19 and December 21, 2008 on Royal Caribbean’s Independence of the Seas.

The cruises will vary between 4 and 8 days. They will leave from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and either go through the Western Caribbean or the Eastern depending on the individual cruise.

I imagine an event like this with the passengers competing in the contest throughout the week would generate a lot of excitement as the days progressed. There would never be a shortage of things to talk about during dinners or at the pool.

I do not think I would be willing to get on stage, but you never know after a couple margarita.

Are you looking to take a cruise highly tailored toward making sure your kids are entertained? Are your kids bigger fans of SpongeBob than Mickey Mouse?

If so, the first ever Nickelodeon Family Cruise might just be the cruise for you featuring tons of kid activities and show casing your kids favorite Nickelodeon characters.

The cruise set for August 10-17 will be a one time test for Nickelodeon who is looking to venture into the family travel business. If everything goes well, they plan on scheduling future trips more frequently.

The cruise will take place on Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. The current largest ship in the Royal Caribbean fleet features such highlights as the FlowRider surfing pool, waterpark, rock-climbing wall, ice-skating rink and all the amenities you would expect on a Royal Caribbean ship.

Project Genesis is a Royal Caribbean cruise ship scheduled for completion in 2009. Upon completion it will be the largest cruise ship in history able accommodating up to 5,400 passengers and stretching 1,180 feet long.

Despite some concerns that the ship will not be completed in time, the shipyard building Project Genesis, Aker Yards, denies any delays and says they are still planning on having the ship delivered on time.

There still is no word on when and where the Royal Caribbean cruise ship is planning on going for its first trip.

The first stop on our Royal Caribbean cruise was in Belize. Because of the size of the Explorer of the Seas, the ship could not dock on the port so we had to take the shuttle boat to get to the land. The shuttle took about ten minutes and was by far the bumpiest moments we had during the entire week.

Just like every stop, the first thing you see is the market surrounding the dock. We chose the all day tour to Cahal Pech which quickly departed before giving us time to trinket shop.

Some of the activities worth doing in Belize involve visiting the ruins, visiting the underwater caves, hanging out at the beach and wandering around Belize City.

Ruins

We went to Cahal Pech which is a relatively small Mayan ruin way across the country. The bus ride took several hours. The trip out was an interesting exposure to all the variety of life Belize has to offer but we did not actually stop anywhere until we arrived at the ruins.

There are several different ruins that you can visit, some with pretty large pyramids. If you are interested in one of those tours, I would recommend signing up for it well before you get on the boat since they fill up pretty quickly.

A couple recommendations for an excursion to any of the ruins. Bring food and water because you probably will not have as many opportunities to pick them up on the way as you might prefer. Book the excursion through the ship. Most of the ruins are very far from the boat. If you book the excursion through the ship, they will wait for you to return if there is a traffic delay. If you wait until you get to Belize City and try to make your own arrangements, the ship will not wait for you if you are not back in time.

Underwater Caves

The other excursion that I considered involved drifting through the underwater caves. Now that I have seen Cahal Pech, if I end up back in an area like Belize, I will definitely try to take this kind of a gentle adventure excursion.

Beach

There is a private beach right where the shuttle boats drop you off that you can pay to hang around for the day. The water is crystal clear and makes an excellent place for scuba diving, snorkeling, swimming and eating. The couple that sat at our dinner table had a great day swimming at this beach.

Belize City

Belize City is an interesting city but feels very run down. While driving through the city on the bus to Cahal Pech, it reminded me of the border towns in Mexico where there are very few people that look like they are doing much better than just getting by and if the tourists left, there probably would not be much of an economy left behind.

If you want to spend time exploring one of the cities for one of your day excursions, I would recommend waiting for a different day. Between the history of the ruins, the tranquility of the underground caves, or the solitude and fun of the beach I think the city itself is definitely the worst option for spending the day.

The Explorer of the Seas is one of the Royal Caribbean Voyager Family ships. It is a big ship capably of holding about 3,100 guests.

It is the ship we took on the 7 night Western Caribbean cruise back in January ‘07.

The ship is just amazing and I highly recommend any of the ships in this family for your next cruise.

This week I’m going to talk about the ships, what there was to do at each of the stops, and what there is to do on the ships during the days at sea.

First, lets talk about the ship itself and the people that work on it.

Rooms

We knew that we would not be spending much time in our room, so we went with the cheapest rooms they offer. We ended up getting upgraded to a window side room on the third deck.

From the window we had a better view of the waves then any other spot on the ship.

The room had a queen sized bed (it was really two twin beds that they attach together to make a queen. With a small couch, a TV, plenty of closet and dresser space, and a nice clean bathroom it had everything that we needed to accommodate us comfortably during the time we did spend there.

Dining

We almost always had dinner in the formal dining area. The food there was outstanding. The menu always had plenty of variety that it seemed like we were constantly eating completely different kinds of food.

For breakfast and lunch on sea days we seemed to alternate between the formal dining area and the all you can eat cafeteria. The cafeteria food was definitely nowhere near as fancy as the formal dining area, but we were always able to find plenty of things that we enjoyed.

We also used room service to get omelets for breakfast a few times. The food came at the scheduled time, was always hot and matched exactly what we ordered.

We had dinner at Johnny Rockets once. A fast food burger, fries and a shake is a nice change of pace to the food served on the rest of the ship.

Cruising

One of my biggest concerns before going on the cruise was how my stomach would be affected by the waves. You can definitely notice the rocking the entire time at sea, but between the size of the ship and the high tech stabilizers it was rarely disturbing.

There was a huge storm on one of the nights which caused the ship to sway noticeably but it was always gentle. I was shocked when we got back to my room and saw how huge the waves were compared to how little movement the ship had.

Support Staff

I have never seen so many nice people working for one place. Everybody was always smiling, always available and always able to help no matter where we were in the ship.

The rooms and every area of the ship were always perfectly maintained.

About my only complaint about the ship was the cost of using their internet service. Fortunately, I only spent about 20 minutes online total and enjoyed the vacation away from the internet the rest of the time.