When my wife and I were shopping for our next cruise, we briefly considered a sailing from Dubai to Rome, before we realized that the flight to Dubai is prohibitively long for someone with severe fibromyalgia.

It’s a shame, however, because steaming around the Arabian Peninsula sounds rather exciting these days.

From the New York Times:

Pirates chased and shot at an American cruise ship with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a corridor patrolled by international warships, officials said Tuesday.

The captain of the cruise ship, the M/S Nautica, ordered passengers inside and gunned the engine, allowing the ship to outrun the pirates’ speedboats in the Gulf of Aden on Sunday, a company spokesman said.

Seen at the Daily Mail:

[T]his mighty vessel [the Celebrity Solstice], the largest ever passenger ship, dwarfs all that stands next to it, making the thousands of spectators which came to see it’s launch look little more than ants as they waved the graceful ship out of the port.

The 315m-long ship is so wide it barely squeezed out of the Papenberg watergates, but ably helped by two tug-boats it escaped on it’s to the North sea, where it will head to Denmark.

And I thought Crown Princess, or our upcoming ship, Explorer, was big….

My wife and I were talking about vacation plans, and holiday travel….and, well a bit of websurfing turned up a Royal Caribbean cruise we couldn’t pass up.

So, we’re now booked on Explorer of the Seas for its Christmas 2009 / New Years 2010 sailing out of Cape Liberty (Bayonne), New Jersey.  It’s a 14-night itinerary visiting San Juan, St. Thomas, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua, Sint Maarten, St. Kitts, and Tortola, with Christmas and New Years Days spent at sea.

We made it official by joining the Roll Call at Cruise Critic and everything.

In a post I composed while my wife and I were on our cruise this summer, I noted that there seemed to be a lot of complainers on the ship.

An article in the New York Times has me thankful that the complainers on Crown Princess weren’t as obnoxious as some observed recently on Sapphire Princess:

“First there was a group of what I’d call rabble-rousers, led by a lawyer,” she said. “We were missing all of these ports, and they felt they weren’t getting the truth” from the ship’s officers. At one point, with passengers assembled in the ship’s theater, she said, “the attorney jumped up and grabbed the microphone away from the assistant cruise director and said: ‘We’re taking over the stage! We have a petition!’”[...]

“There was a big shouting match with the captain,” she said. “One passenger was telling everybody he was captain of a yacht back home.” He stormed the bridge with Google Earth printouts, she said, and demanded to show the captain how to navigate around the storm.

As the ship approached its final port, near Beijing, a few passengers threatened to barricade themselves in their staterooms unless they got $1,000 in chits and a free cruise. Resistance collapsed when the captain noted that the police in Beijing would probably not be in the mood for negotiation, Ms. Spencer Brown said.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned (even if I often forget it), it’s that sometimes you just need to take life’s unexpected twists in stride. Life can get so depressing if you dwell on every little thing that is imperfect or doesn’t go as planned. And true, I can expect folks to be somewhat upset if they don’t get what they perceive is value for money spent… near-mutiny is a bit of an overreaction, don’tcha think?

Yes, I know that we’ve been back now for over two months.  However, I’ve been lazy and it’s taken me this long to get around to getting some of the video I shot uploaded to YouTube.

It’s not great quality (first video I’ve ever shot, much less my first uploads to YouTube), but I thought I’d share (below the break):

Here’s a video recording of a stroll outside around the aft of Crown Princess:

Continuing the stroll, from aft forward, on the upper decks of Crown Princess:

The beach at Meads Bay, Anguilla, from our shore excursion when we docked at Sint Maarten:

The dolphins that folks on the Anguillan excursion swam with:

And just some video of the wake of Crown Princess:

OK, so it took longer than I intended to get this done, but better late than never.

One trademark of life onboard the Crown Princess was the daily delivery of the Princess Patter, the onboard newsletter that provided a rundown of the daily activities as well as exhortations to buy more stuff from the ship’s vendors.

While waiting for the cruise, I enjoyed looking at Patters others had shared from their cruises. And so, I’m going to return the favor:

• Day 1 (New York embarkation), 28 August 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 2 (at sea), 29 August 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 3 (at sea), 30 August 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 4 (San Juan), 31 August 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 5 (St. Maarten), 1 September 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 6 (St. Thomas), 2 September 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 7 (Grand Turk), 3 September 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 8 (at sea), 4 September 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Day 9 (at sea), 5 September 2007 (3mb pdf)
• Disembarkation Guide (2mb pdf)
• Log Of The Cruise (3mb pdf)

If you’re interested in similar information from other cruises, I’ll recommend Cruise Dailies.

And, if you just happened to stumble upon this page via search engine or wherever, please feel free to check out my commentary written during my recent cruise, and some of the pictures taken during the cruise.

In case you’re interested, additional pictures from the cruise are now up in the photo gallery.

Sail-in into Brooklyn was absolutely beautiful, despite the hour. I woke up around 5:30 to the lights of Long Island out the window, and my wife joined me on our balcony as we went under the Verazzano Narrows Bridge and the New York City skyline came into view. I was able to get a few more photos, and get online via the EVDO modem (including clearing out the long queue of articles written at sea)

To disembark the ship, passengers were divided into several color-coded groups. We were in “Light Blue 3″ (”Light Blue” = folks on Northeast Motor Coach busses; “3″ = Folks on the Hartford/Springfield routes). So at 9:20am, we gathered at the Wheelhouse Bar and waited for permission to disembark.

Apparently until fairly recently, staff would use the ship-wide announcement system to let folks know which groups were being permitted off the ship. However, to reduce the stress of the experience, Princess now just tells folks where and when to meet up, and at the relevant lounges, staff armed with walkie-talkies and in-lounge mikes make the announcement. Unfortunately, this left several folks asking passers-by which group they were with, to gauge the queue, and a few folks who had gone outside to smoke or elsewhere to sit ended up not hearing the notifications.

Getting off the ship was orderly, and once inside the cruise terminal, getting moving was a simple matter of finding our bags (placed out and grouped by our color-tags), and getting them over to the customs & immigration folks. Unfortunately, we learned:

• The luggage trolleys are only to be used by the porters, due to union rules; and
• The terminal was short-staffed in the way of porters, allegedly due to some ongoing negotiations between the terminal and the union.

So, my wife and I entertained several folks by getting our luggage over to the customs queue.  (I’m told that my carrying two bags and wheeling 3 suitcases, following behind my wife who had loaded up her walker, looked rather comical.)

Clearing customs was a breeze.  16 desks, almost all of them open; the officer (less surly than the trio we met at St. Thomas) glanced at our passports, glanced at our customs form, and waved us on.

A bus ride later, we got home.

It seems strange being someplace where the floor isn’t moving, having so much more space to ourselves (including separate bathrooms!), and not needing to go up or down mutliple flights of stairs to get something other than water to drink.  We’re happy to be home, but we wish we still had that balcony overlooking the ocean.

I’m pooped from unloading the car, starting to clean out my work email inbox, etc.  It’ll probably be this weekend before I get the cruise photos up in the photo gallery.

Written at 415pm, Wednesday 5 September on Crown Princess at 36°9.55′ N, 73°8.82′ W

Well, we’re back in temperate regions, and it’s a nice warm (not hot), not too humid day. It’s the first day that I’ve been really comfortable outside since embarkation day.

It’s been a good cruise, but I think I’ve definitely established that I’m not a hot-weather person.

Things are a little hectic onboard, with last minute sales, and a long line at the passenger services desk. Luggage has started to appear outside in the hallway, and my wife is trying to figure out how the heck to get all the stuff she picked up enroute into her luggage.

With the cool-down in weather, I’ve spent a fair amount of time outside, either sitting or walking the Promenade, or out on our balcony. Probably the best thing about the trip from my perspective has simply been being able to sit and watch the water, and do nothing.

I realize that’s not to everyone’s taste, but considering how unpredictable and chaotic real life is for me, it’s been a welcome change. But, I am looking forward to getting back home, seeing whether our cat and dog remember us, and getting back to work.

Before the cruise, I had been “warned” by a coworker that it was her impression that there is a “cruising cult,” folks who think that cruising is the best thing on earth. And, while our experience on Crown Princess has satisfied our vacation goals (traveling, getting away, and being flexible enough to accommodate the randomness of my wife’s fibromyalgia), I do wish we had been able to partake in a bit more of what was offered.

That’s not a failing on Princess’ part, mind you…it’s just an artifact of our unique lives.

Still, this has been a very enjoyable experience….but our next cruise will probably wait until we’re better able to enjoy the cruise’s festivities, and will be to someplace that isn’t so danged hot.

In all likelihood this is the last “on the ship” post I’ll write and queue up. (Just looked at the posting queue…geez it’s going to take a while to clear.) However, I’ll probably post about disembarkation once we’re home, and I’ll share a link to the cruise photos in the photo gallery once I’ve uploaded them.