Boarding a cruise without taking a flight is always a treat.
We could have driven or taken buses, but we used a combination of trains and cabs to get to Brooklyn to board Island Princess.
For Julie and me, going through NYC is just a means to an end at this point.
We would be cruising during the peak week of hurricane season, a risk we understood at the time we booked. Originally, we chose that date because we thought I would be driving Emma to ice skating and tennis team practices during the waning weeks of her summer vacation.
As it turned out, choosing to go on what statistically is the highest probability week for a tropical storm in the Caribbean and Bermuda proved to be fortunate. I had clients who were cruising during the last two weeks of August, and their itineraries were tweaked.
The prior sailing on Island Princess, which we originally leaned toward, ended up spending the first three nights in port in Brooklyn before cruising to Bermuda, where they spent two nights instead of the scheduled overnight stay. Passengers on that sailing missed all of the great Caribbean ports.
However, as cruisers have come to expect, this type of change often results in offers to compensate. In this case, guests were given the right to cancel entirely with a free refund and 50% off a future cruise, or onboard credit if they continued with the altered itinerary plus 50% off a future cruise.
We dined one evening with a couple from Georgia who said they made the most of the unexpected mini-vacation in New York City, taking the free ferry to Manhattan to go shopping and see the Big Apple.
They immediately used the 50% off coupon to book the cruise that we were on. Our cruise undoubtedly had quite a few last-second cancellations caused by fear of Hurricane Erin and covered by "cancel for any reason" Princess policies to open space.
Last-minute cancellations --- along with the end of school summer vacations --- made for a less crowded vacation, which was a bonus for Julie and me.
Along those same lines, clients who were on a Royal Caribbean cruise from Cape Liberty, NJ, at the end of August were initially disappointed but came home calling it their best cruise ever.
The key to booking a cruise in hurricane season is to stay flexible rather than clinging tight to what cannot be. The cruise lines won't knowingly put their customers or ships in harm's way, and they have a very good track record. Always trust the process.
Make the most of the hand you're dealt but plan ahead by securing a good seat at the table. We took advantage of reduced pricing to book a Mini-Suite, our first time ever stretching beyond standard Balcony accommodations. That proved to be a nice treat throughout our cruise. The extra floor space gave me room to do my morning stretches without going to the gym.
The Mini-Suite's seating area with a full sized, comfortable sofa served as a great place to watch the movie Argyle, which we both really liked. It was a funny and fun movie to watch, albeit the only movie we ended up watching this time, because the weather turned out to be so great. Incidentally, there's a second big-screen TV just to watch from bed that we usually turned on for a few minutes upon returning from a night of great dining and entertainment.
While we never laid in the tub for a bath, the larger bathroom to accommodate the bathtub was a feature we appreciated. It made for the additional counter space and gave us a place over the tub to hang our rinsed swimsuits to dry. A bath is a good way to treat a headache or soothe aching muscles, so it was nice having that possibility available.
The considerably larger balcony of a Mini-Suite is obviously a nice feature.
On this cruise, we took advantage of ideal late-summer weather to spend more time than ever in our private outdoor space.
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| Captain Morgan returning to Brooklyn after cruising through pirate waters. |
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