AARP Online Community: sk8teacher

sk8teacher

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Name: William

Birthday: November 20

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WARRENTON, Virginia
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Professional Snow Ski Instructor, Inline Skate Instructor, Red Cross First Aid/CPR Instructor, and Technical Writer to support my hobbies. I am also an avid nature photographer

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I find that the typical cost of a cruise line excursion to be high, when compared with a comparable tour offered by local guides. I also have found that cities that have hop-on hop-off buses are a good value generally. The buses tend to go by or near most of the major tourist attractions in their city, and the ability to get on and off at will is nice. At a cost of about $35 per person for unlimited transportation I find it very reasonable.

That said the research involved does take time, which is why I have started now for our next cruise in March 09. Our next cruise is a 50 day Grand Mediterranean and Baltic Sea Cruise on Holland America’s Prinsendam. It is round-trip out of Ft. Lauderdale. We live about 50 miles from Washington DC but because of the hassles flying now, we are taking Amtrak roundtrip.

During our cruise, we will stop at the following ports:

Gustavia-St. Barthelemy, Guadeloupe
St. Lucia and Soufriere
Tenerife, Canary Islands
Lanzarote, Canary Islands
Gibraltar UK
Cartegena, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
Marseille, France
Monte Carlo, Monaco
Florence/Pisa, Italy
Rome, Italy
Naples, Italy
Athens, Greece
Istanbul, Turkey
Varna, Bulgaria
Sevastopol, Ukraine
Ephesus, Turkey
Santorini, Greece
Valletta, Malta
Cadiz, Spain
Lisbon, Portugal
Ponta Delgada, Portugal
Bermuda
New York City

As you can see the research to figure out what there is to see and do in these ports is going to take some time. As we figure out what we want to do, I will post here some thoughts on the individual ports and what we have found.

Added: October 2, 2008
Views: 119 | Comments: 1 | Bookmarks: 0

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aprilb58 says:

I printed out your almost daily reports on the Maasdam cruise--Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, et. al. This was a bit more than we have time for since we're both still working. We're long-time HAL mariners and stick with 7, 10, and this year 12 Mediterranean), day cruises.
Every other year we cruise HAL from Vancouver BC to Seward. Now we pretty much take a walk around each port and spend the rest of the time relaxing on the ship. At Seward we rent a car and go in a different direction every time, although we might try the Alaskan Railroad to Anchorage for a change. The other years we try a different itinerary, but try to stay to the north, since we're cold weather people (we have lived in New Mexico for 12 years and can't wait to retire to Michigan's UP, where we have already bought our waterfront retirement home).
Was the Viking cruise you took a regular cruise or a repositioning? We don't ever check out cruises that are more than 12 days, so never noticed this one. We have looked into shorter cruises, but they don't have many stops in Ireland, which we would really like to see. Any advice that wasn't in your posts?

Posted: August 29, 2008 5:12PM EDT