JLMoran

And there's the lesson, and also another reinforcement that I should invest in those add-on lenses for my phone! I never thought a wide angle lens made sense with a device that already has a 56mm equivalent that shoots pretty wide to start with, but you're convincing me otherwise.

Some of those shots you were going around a bend, but ones like this: Or this one: And all I can think is, "Teach me, master!" Well, that and, "For God's sake, watch your damn fool head! There's another train passing right next to you!"

I forgot to ask in my last comment -- You commented how there were open air observation areas at the front and back of each train car, but still, just how far were you leaning out to get those clear shots of the whole train stretching ahead or behind you, with no sign of window opening or other parts of your own car and only the amazing landscape?!?

What an amazing trip that must have been. Thanks for this great recap of all the ports and sights, and all those utterly amazing photos!

Really nice sunset shot! These photos are gorgeous! Hand-held, or did you have a tripod or monopod handy? How long an exposure?

Good news from that blog article is that not only are gratuities that were already pre-paid grandfathered on the old rate, but so are any gratuities for cruises booked prior to Jan 2 that are pre-paid any time between Jan 2 and embarkation day. I was planning to do the pre-payment next month or February, when all other expenses around cruise fare and airfare are out of the way, so I'm not going to pay a penalty for my budgeting decisions. For that, I'm genuinely thankful to Royal and how they chose to handle this change.

Thanks for the recommendation of Lyft or taxi as a better alternative. Still looking at the Embassy Suites because of the central location and overall good reviews. Cost to rent a car, using @DocLC's quoted $20 a day, is decently less than the $36 my family of four would have to pay for each shuttle ride, so if I can find a mid-size or large sedan at that rate that can hold all the luggage we'll have (three to four suitcases and four carry-ons), that can work. Of course, now I have to see the rates and then go back to the missus and say, "You know how I said I didn't want to rent a car...?" And then there's the slight hassle of following Matt's advice to drop the rest of the family at the port first, then drive the car back to the rental agency, and then take their shuttle back to the port. I want to be in the port at the same time as everyone else, dang it! Why do they get to "ooh" and "ahh" and ogle the ship while I have to do administrative work?!?

Further reading about the Embassy Suites reveals another perk of booking there -- shuttle both to/from the airport and to/from the cruise port; both are $9 pp, with two people complimentary if you book the room with the right package. And then with the hotel centrally located, the need for a rental car is essentially nil if we decide to skip the Japanese gardens. At most we'd just grab a Lyft to get to whatever beach or other place wasn't in easy walking distance.

Yeah, those are not insignificant differences. And given my mobility limits, being in the center of everything with short walks or easy access to Lyft sounds a lot better. Thanks for the feedback!

Wanted to ask about another property that I see is listed on the Embassy Suites site as being right in downtown Las Olas -- Hampton Inn Ft. Lauderdale / Downtown Las Olas Area. If anyone has stayed there and also at the Embassy Suites 17th Street, how do they compare? The Hampton Inn is $50 less per night right now, but that's a little less of a concern since I wouldn't actually be paying for the room until we were there (well after all other cruise expenses are paid off). To tie this thread back over to the discussion on flights during Easter weekend -- I'm finding that if I can book my flight down on that Wednesday before Easter instead of flying down Thursday, I will be saving just shy of $800 no matter what airline I look at (between Jet Blue, United, SW). If I'm going to be paying for one extra night in a hotel, might choose the less expensive option if there's little to no difference in quality between them. Side note -- was looking for any hotels in the Carlson family (Radisson, Country Inns & Suites, I forget what other) as I'm a Club Carlson member, but they have nothing in FLL proper, only one property in Miami. Makes me wish I backed a different team, but those are what we have and like to stay in for all of our New England trips!

Hi Shary, welcome to our group! One of our other members, @Sabrinaklai, was just mentioning this cruise in another thread. It's a very port-intensive cruise and you actually won't be spending a lot of time on the ship, so the fact that Vision is older (I won't go so far as to say "outdated", since I haven't sailed her and can't judge) shouldn't be a big issue. Sabrina may be able to say more about this.

It's like Santa came a week early! I get to read more live blogs and see more photos and cruise vicariously! Huzzah!!

@tiny260, thanks for the tip about using SkyScanner. Just downloaded the app and immediately found a couple of flights in my preferred window, one on Jet Blue and one on United, that I've saved for tracking and alerts. Interestingly, United is actually the cheaper flight right now, by $56 pp. Still crazy expensive, though -- $2,333 for the four of us on United, $2,557 on Jet Blue (via the JustFly site, not Jet Blue's site). Both United and Jet Blue have a first-bag fee of $25 per person on their cheapest rates, so it's genuinely less. That said, I'm definitely watching this. If Jet Blue stays this relatively close as I get closer to the magic 90-day mark, I may still go with them for the better leg room and at least moderate certainty I won't be assaulted if they need a passenger to get off the flight. At 6' 3", I've got some long legs to cram into an airline seat space. Here's the interesting part. If I could convince my family to fly down on Wednesday instead of Thursday (which would mean missing a full day of school and having to leave early on Wednesday), the seats going down are almost $200 cheaper per person for the same departure time, and the price for the four of us (still coming home the same day) goes down to $1,794. United also gets cheaper, going down to $1,622 for the four of us. Still stupidly high on both airlines, but a bit more palatable when it's $700-$800 less out of pocket. And that would give us another day to explore FLL area at our leisure. Just have to see what the hotels are charging those nights (looking back at the ones recommended here in a separate thread), to see if the savings from the earlier flight would be gobbled up by the extra hotel night. God, it's like I'm back in high school taking a financial planning class!

Once a week cruise therapy is not enough. I need several times a day!

I think it's a combination of holiday weekend and Spring Break weekend / week for many schools this year. Normally Easter weekend is closer to mid-April and the Spring Break season is over and done with. But this year we get the Daily Double, as it were.

Thanks for another great live blog, @Traveler! You and @twangster, and your live blogs, are the only things keeping from going nuts and jumping up and down shouting "I want it NOW!!" as I'm only 3 days away from starting the double-digit dance for my March cruise on Freedom. Not sure I can hold until your next cruises for another bit of "therapy blog reading"!

@greenline627, do keep in mind that if you were trying to view your reservation details / pull up Cruise Planner while an RCI rep was looking at your reservation, you'll be blocked with a message that it's currently being modified. I found that one out the first time I had to call them to handle rebooking an excursion when the site wouldn't take my card for some reason.

First thought is, "It's cruise critic, home of the ever-love-to-complain crowd." Will have to see what the reality is when my Anthem sailing in October gets closer and then when I'm on board. I'm in a J4 for that trip and dining in CK every night was one of the things I was looking forward to surprising my wife with, besides the room itself (she still thinks we're in a regular balcony).

I don't use any of those things, my wife just brings bottles of sanitizing gel in her purse for times when we're seeing that things are looking a little skeevy. We are strong proponents of regular and thorough hand washing after bathroom use or any time we've come into contact with anything really dirty / questionable (cleaning the cat boxes, handling wet garbage / sink strainer, etc). But we've read enough articles about the need to be exposed to dirt / grime / daily cruft so that your skin, gut, and immune system maintains a proper biome that we're all willing to "take our chances" and not worry over-much about sanitizing every surface we come into contact with in our travels. And I will say that following that policy, my family and I have never gotten sick on any vacation we've been on, at least not with anything on the level of Norovirus or other real nasties. And we've been to Disney a couple of times (very clean, of course, but communal restaurants are still communal restaurants), and Six Flags (which is way less focused on spick and span levels of cleanliness than Disney) far more times than that over the years without incident. My younger daughter has had Noro at home once, and never ever ever wants to have it again, but that was most likely picked up at school.

Prices that I saw for Delta and United (only ones available on Kayak) were in the $600-$900 per person range for the round trip flight in Economy Plus (I need the leg room), in the time periods I'm willing to fly and the days we are looking to fly down (two days prior to embarkation) and back up (day after debarkation). Jet Blue was a little better, but still looking like it would be about $500-$800 per person round trip. Southwest seemed to be the lowest, as long as I'm willing to go with their cheapest non-refundable rate. But as noted, they're my last choice as long as JetBlue is only a little more expensive. I did note that JetBlue's mid-tier price that includes the one checked bag along with a carry-on has a price bump that is essentially a couple dollars less than the price of buying the cheapest fare and then checking a bag at the airport. So at least there's no price gouging going on there and they seem to be keeping things fair. But United and Delta are just beyond ridiculous. Especially when those rates don't include any checked baggage costs, and those are also exorbitant (based on my last flight to Florida about six years ago).

I've only done a land vacation to Hawaii (my honeymoon), and I might be bucking the majority by saying this, but I think a suite is not worth the extra expense; a balcony may be, if you typically get a balcony room anyway, but if it would be a splurge I'd say save the money for excursions. With the possible exception of the Na Pali Coast in Kaua'i (and I don't know that the cruise ships can get close enough to really see it properly), all of the major sights and amazing views are, IMO, well inland and not something you can really see from the balcony of a cruise ship docked in port. Even on Oahu, the beach area where the ships will be is mainly the hotels as your view. Some of the best experiences I had when on my honeymoon: Oahu Horseback riding along the northern coast of the island Visiting the Polynesian Cultural Center Kaua'i Land tour of the island, with stops at lookouts into the Kalalau Valley, Waimea Canyon, and Waimea Falls (the waterfall from Fantasy Island's title sequence) Helicopter tour of the island, including a drop down into the rainforest crater where we saw loads of waterfalls Zodiac tour of the Na Pali Coast, including going into old lava tubes with open air caves and snorkeling at a couple of reefs Maui Pre-dawn bus ride to the summit of Mount Haleakala, where we watched the sunrise and then rode bikes back down to the mainland (doubt this would be an option on any cruise unless they did an overnight in Maui; and to be fair, I had to be sandbagged halfway down, because that bike ride portion is as outright scary as it is breathtaking) Self-guided walking tour of the botanical gardens Sailing / Snorkeling trip that included a stop at Molokini, a small atoll with a ton of beautiful tropical fish That honeymoon was nearly 20 years ago now, and the fact I can not only remember all the excursions we did, but the names of the places we visited, should tell you all you need to know about how memorable it all was.

So glad you posted this! I had forgotten that I need to keep an eye out for that myself. My own 90-day mark is in a couple of weeks, but I just looked up prices to get an idea of what's there right now. To say it's ridiculous is a severe understatement. My airfare at current rates on Delta or United would be over half of what I'm paying for the cruise! JetBlue and Southwest are a good bit better but still seem kind of high. Would prefer JetBlue, but I need to mind the credit card this time around and might have to go with Southwest. I know a lot of folks here swear by them, but I can't do a flight where you don't know your seats until you board. My older daughter is absolutely terrified of flying and will already likely be taking something to deal with the extreme anxiety. If she ended up having to be by herself it could be an absolute disaster.

Hmmm, might have my next career move staring at me. Do employees get good (any) discounts on bookings?

I live in NJ and have bought a few things from B&H, they're definitely a good vendor. But this iMac (the latest 27" 5K model) couldn't be one of them. I bought a build-to-order model, and Apple only sells those through its web site. Vendors like B&H only get stock configurations. I wish I could figure out why you're unable to log in to the Royal site on your computer. But if the iPad option is working, at least you have a solution at hand. One thought, which does get a little technical. If you go into Safari's preferences and click on Advanced, there's a checkbox at the bottom of that panel that says "Show Develop menu in menu bar". If you check that off, you'll see the new menu at the top of the screen in between Bookmarks and Window. After enabling that, you'll have an option in that window labeled "Empty Caches". You might want to try clicking that while you're not on the RCI site, then quit and restart your browser again. After that, you may find that now when you log in, your cruises are properly showing in the My Cruises page again. I don't really get why Apple hides the cache clearing function this way, when all other browsers make it an up-front option (though still tucked away in the Advanced section of their preferences screens). It's (sadly) a still-common way to resolve problems with stale data hanging around.

It's things like this, as someone who has been mobility limited for over a decade now, and gone through multiple painful surgeries to resolve as much of the problem as possible, that really piss me off. I don't need a scooter; thanks to the surgeries I don't even need a cane any longer (having had to use one for a good ten years). But all I can do is walk, and that for not more than a few miles total in a day, spread out over a bunch of smaller segments. My days of dancing, bike riding (one of my favorite activities back in the day), and wandering around places to explore for hours on end are long gone. I'm not saying she wasn't disabled. I worked with someone who had MS, and learned that's a very "invisible" disease; she'd have good days where she'd be moving utterly normally for her young age one day, but could be half crippled the next. Maybe that's what was going on here with this woman, but even if it was, that's no reason for her to get all entitled and snooty with the crew. Not only is she being an assclown, she's giving a bad rep to everyone with a disability on that ship who just wants a bit of understanding and accommodation to make their trip enjoyable.