OK, we made some changes to our vacation schedule…. It wasn’t easy to do, but we managed to find new vacations to fill the old spots…
We had to cancel the Silhouette Inaugural cruise in July for personal reasons, so we had an opening in the fall of 2011 (bummer). Around the same time we found that the September Celebrity Millennium wine cruise had opened the Concierge Class 1 rooms so we swiped room 6143… We thought that the fall cruise was better for the weather (warmer), the itinerary (one more port in Monterey), the time of year (vineyards are doing their wine making thing) and flights (flying home from Vancouver can be a pain). So, we canceled our May wine cruise. This created a serious gap in our vacationing….
Well, for the longest time I have wanted to try one of the small ship, ultra lux lines (Crystal, Seabourn, Regent or SilverSea) so I started doing some research. I found that, even though they are rated the highest in customer support, Crystal is not all-inclusive. That brought it down to Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Seabourn and SilverSeas lines. In the end, we decided to go with a 7 day St. Thomas roundtrip on Seabourn Legend for early March 2011. The itinerary is amazing and the ship is truly a departure from anything we have ever done (10,000 gross tons). We shall see how things progress..
Soon, we should have my parents’ Celebrity Millennium Alaska cruise pics online; these pics are amazing.. Stay Tuned
When I moved our website from the old setup to the WordPress setup, the cruise ship list didn’t exactly migrate well. There were errors such as wrong maiden voyage dates and gross tonnage. Well, I finally got around to totally redoing the tables with a new method and I must say that I am pretty impressed. Take a look at the “Cruise Ships” under the “Cruising Documentation” tab at the top of the page (or click the link below) and let me know what you think. All I ask in return is: if you notice an error, reply to this post with what is wrong. Enjoy.
We really only have good things to say about Celebrity’s Solstice and the ship felt like home. There were a few changes such as the Gallery Tastings bar has been changed to the Molecular Bar and the anytime dining in Blu. I do have to say that I was a bit annoyed by having to do anytime in Blu, but it turned out that we really liked it. I don’t think that I would have been as happy about it if I had to stand in ANY line to get in; we walked up and were seated.
Well, we went a bit overboard and booked TWO new cruises. We just put a deposit down on the May 3, 2011 Wine Cruise on Celebrity Millennium and, while onboard, booked the Celebrity Silhouette inaugural. We may end up canceling the inaugural, but we have them booked out there for now.
About 2 more weeks before we board Solstice for our second voyage on the ship and we are really looking forward to seeing one of our favorite ships again. Just to see the differences between the room layouts, we decided to get the AquaClass room immediately nextdoor tot he one we were in last time so that we can see if we like the bed near the doors or near the bathroom better. This time around, however, we are going in with quite a bit of OBC from booking credits and price corrections. We really can’t wait…
Since my last post on here, we booked 6 nights at Secrets Maroma Beach in September.. Yes, I know it is hurricane season, but we bought the “cancel for any reason” insurance that Apple Vacations offers so I believe we are safe. We have only heard great things about that resort so it will be a wonderful way to spend a week in the fall. Later.
Well, we’re back from the canal and, well, we’re cold… The Panama Canal is everything that we hoped it would be; it is simply amazing that this engineering project was completed 97 years ago. Even by today’s standards it would be a feat. Next on the agenda: back to Celebrity Solstice..
We are still putting together the pictures from the cruise (Emily shot WELL OVER 1000 pics), however I have created a page for our cruisemates, Sydney and Jim. Here is the page SYD AND JIM’S PAGE.
Make sure that you check out the Karaoke links…. Trust me, you have never seen someone Karaoke like this before; I really was not prepared for what I witnessed.
The countdown is less than 1 week until we are in WARM weather. Acapulco is our first stop and we will end up in Fort Lauderdale a week and a half later. While I really don’t like packing, it is a means to an end (getting there.) We will probably have a really large number of pics so stay tuned.
This is great….. Our swim up junior suite at Excellence Playa Mujeres is amazing; I am sitting on the day bed on our patio to do a quick post to our site. The temperature is somewhere in the 80s and our piece of the pool is about 20 feet away. It doesn’t get much better than this… Actually, the scene would be complete with the pets hanging out next to me.
Nick, Donna, Nadia and Marcos, email to our tnewebmaster@gmail.com account and I will get you our personal email addresses. By the time you read this you will probably be back home as well…
I recently offered to post the daily newsletters from Celebrity Mercury Alaskan cruise. The ports visited are Seattle, Nanaimo and Victoria. Thanks to RonAndAnnette from CruiseCritic.com for sending these to me. Please note that these are somewhat big (1.1MB-2.6MB so they may not open immediately). You can right-click “Save As” to download them to your workstation. You will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader (or similar) installed to open these.
We just couldn’t wait until our mid-October vacation to Excellence Playa Mujeres, so we decided to take the least expensive cruise we could to the Bahamas. We booked an inside stateroom guarantee on Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas for a 3 night cruise. We make stops in Nassau, Bahamas and Cococay, Bahamas (never been here) for a couple of nice relaxing beach days. If you have any suggestions or advice on the cruise or ship, please let us know.
It is safe to say that since the swap to WordPress, our site (www.tomandemily.com) has been MUCH slower than it was before. This, however, was not the fault of the software, but rather my own inexperience with using the gallery software. Now that I have cropped the pictures down to something more reasonable, the site appears to be a lot faster. It was more of a bandwidth issue than anything else. In addition, I upgraded the server hardware and updated all of the plugins to their newest versions. I was also able to get all of the pictures migrated to the new site. I hope you like it.
I still have to get the videos posted so “Stay Tuned”.
