billdauterive

Get out of my head! Literally the exact same for me (minus actually having one booked).

And it usually only takes a couple hours after sail away. The limitation is pretty much over by dinner time.

Personally I think November is the perfect time to sail out of Galveston. Texas is not usually cold yet but starting to get cool so between shorts and light jacket. Hurricane season is basically over, the ports are starting their "dry" season, and the humidity and temperatures drop from hot/sweltering to warm/pleasant. Bonus is if you don't go over Thanksgiving it's one of the cheapest times to cruise all year so I always call it the Goldilocks time.

Interesting. This is the first successful case I've heard of using anything other than medical or religious reasons. I wonder if they're just blanket accepting most reasons now if you call in, or if Diamond status has always been a valid reason as well.

Nothing available yet for Feb Allure. I'm curious if they open it up within a certain time frame of sailing date (within 60 days?), or if this is just a trial run for specific sailings.

Agreed. I was trying to simplify my scenario some for a wider audience. My personal use case involves using ssh connections over a corporate vpn which is geolocated on the other side of the country from the actual servers I'm hitting (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) which is the true fragile piece with the latency. Also possible the latency is a red herring in my case... So Starlink might not solve my particular issue, but I'm curious to see for certain if the improved latency does since it approaches that of ground connections. It would at least allow me to rule it out as the true root cause. Definitely. It's shocking how bad it's gotten, especially during reduced passenger capacity early in the restart. I didn't get screenshots at the time but a lot of my tests during a March cruise were coming in under 1000 bps. Not Mbps or Kbps, bps. My first dial up modem was faster.

Just checked, nothing for Allure in Feb.

I agree latency is not that important for most consumer uses, and I would rather have the throughput there. However it does become important for most "business" use cases like VPN. Most VPNs are very finicky with latency and can become unusable even when most other consumer uses (like streaming) work just fine. I would love to work from the ship to be able to take even more cruises each year, but I know my business VPN connection wouldn't be able to handle the current latency (not to mention all the other satellite interruptions you've pointed out previously). Personally I don't need a lot of throughput but I do need a stable connection for business, so I'm tempted to at least try it out now with the lower starlink latency just to see if it's viable in the future.

Yes, Costa Maya has a seaweed problem so none of the beaches will be as pretty as the eastern Caribbean or Florida. I would recommend not just going to the port though, either take a quick taxi to the town of Mahahaul to explore or just stay on the ship and enjoy the solitude. I can't recommend Little French Key either. The time we went it was beyond crowded and almost impossible to get a chair, much less a drink or food. We only stayed a couple of hours before we gave up and left to get back to the ship early. I would at least see how many ships are in port that day (including the Carnival port) before deciding as they obviously don't limit the number of guests. The beaches and facilities were nice, but once again we couldn't really enjoy any of it with the sheer number of people. It felt like a 2 oasis ship day at coco cay on steroids and with way less staff/bartenders.

I can confirm the Costa Maya and Cozumel ones are spot on as that's what we do almost every time (just note if you want to do Maya Chan you'll need to book way in advance as they fill up very quickly). I booked the Roatan suggestion for my next cruise after reading that post a few days ago since we have yet to find a must do there yet. Any recommendations made by the blog have yet to fail me.

Yes, ANY investment account whether tax advantaged or not. Personally I have mine in an HSA for the triple tax advantage and have gotten the stockholder OBC several times.

Yes this should work as I don't believe it would connect to the ships "cellular at sea", only to the land based att towers that are accessible. I would still be careful though as I've personally never tried it so I'm not 100% certain it works as expected.

I just got back from my first time cruising from Canaveral. I'm the person who ignores Matt's advice and flies in the day of on the first nonstop flight of the morning, so I can't comment on overnight staying. However, we did use GoPort for transportation to/from the cruise pier from the airport and I would definitely recommend it. It was quick and easy to check in and the wait for the next bus was only a few minutes. It's $29.99 per person each way. The only downside was our pier was the last one to offload on embarkation (terminal 5) so it added about 30 mins to the ride to drop off at 3 others first. Coming back was only from the terminal we disembarked at so it was quicker.

I can confirm this. No labadee and double coco cay. It was definitely a weird feeling waking up to the ship not moving at all day 2. Especially since we happened to watch Titanic the night before we left...

Going to the port wasn't an issue. It was the other side coming back that was a mess.

Ugh! Figures it would happen during my first cruise out of Canaveral... If I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all I suppose.

If you're looking for just beer, I would highly recommend Klondike Brewing Co over Skagway. They don't serve food there though.

I assume you mean the streaming one and not bringing a physical radio on board. I've never actually tried it but I don't see why it wouldn't (assuming decent ship internet speed at the time). I'll test it out next week on my next cruise to be certain.

It's actually the opposite. Logging in to the account shows actual points and status, behind the scenes shows actual status based on relationship.

My lyft xl was around $80 to and almost $100 coming back. I literally watched the surge pricing kick in as we were waiting for our bags going and getting through customs leaving (I think it was around $60 when I first loaded the app to check both times). We did have 4 in our group so it was still cheaper than any shuttle overall. But if you are only traveling with 2 you might want to look at the shuttles more closely as they might be cheaper.

Kids are not automatically restricted, you'll have to talk to guest services. One charge at the end.

It'll be a moot point in November with Allure since there won't be any Grand Cayman itineraries after that for the foreseeable future. I suspect they thought the hassle of the few cruises left with that itinerary was much less than the hassle of delaying allowing unvaccinated for a few more months out of Galveston.