Tag: sea days

Our 2nd Favorite Port: Costa Rica

Costa Rica was the second stop on our 2011 Thanksgiving cruise on the Carnival Freedom. To date this is one of the best itineraries we’ve sailed due to what we felt was the perfect mix of port days and sea days, allowing us to relax and reflect between stops:

  • Leave Ft Lauderdale
  • Sea day
  • Cozumel
  • Sea day
  • Puerto Limon, Costa Rica
  • Colon, Panama
  • Sea day
  • Sea day
  • Arrive Ft Lauderdale

Puerto Limon, where the ship docked in Costa Rica, is very industrial and not much to look at. When you get off the ship, you’re directed into a small shopping area where the “approved” tours also meet. My wife had set up up with a private tour through Your Lucky Tour, a vendor who we had to meet just outside of the market. We’d seen a few people on a certain cruise board say that this area wasn’t that safe, and to keep an eye on your family as you walked through the market, but none of us ever felt it was unsafe as we walked through the shops and exited on to the street. We quickly found our guide Pablo, who was holding up a sign with our name on it, and headed for his cab.

Our tour was a bit up a mash-up of the ones they offer on their site, and would have us in the car driving around the area quite a bit. It was cloudy and somewhat misty most of the day, but even with that, we found Costa Rica to be a beautiful country. Pablo was an awesome guide, and gave us quite an education on the country, and each of the places we stopped. We did have one heart pounding moment, as we stopped at a checkpoint and had to hand our passports to a couple of men with M16s, but outside of that never felt uncomfortable or unsafe. In addition to a quick stop at a local stand to try some plantains, our tour took us to some pretty cool places:

Jaguar Rescue Center: Despite the name, they rescue far more than just jaguars, including various monkeys, sloths, baby possums, and a few more I’m sure I’m forgetting. While we got to see a couple of younger sloths, they understandably do not allow visitors to touch them, as they’re very fragile animals. The monkeys, however, love to interact with the visitors, and once you’re in there, at least one will find a home on you. When we were in the monkey house, one of them immediately hopped on to my shoulder and couldn’t’ stop playing with my head. Jen and Bayley had similar experiences, but their monkeys immediately curled up in their arms and fell asleep. In addition to the monkey enclosure, we had a guide who gave us a very thorough tour of the facility, showing us various animals along the way.

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Puerto Viejo: After the rescue center, we drove a short ways to Puerto Viejo to walk around and do some shopping. This is an awesome little town right on the water that’s home to some very warm and friendly people. We walked around for about 45min or so, and picked up some things in a few local shops. In the pic of the red car below, the guy standing next to it on his phone is our guide, Pablo.

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Parque Nacional Cahuita: The highlight of this stop was the hike to the beach. I don’t remember the exact length, but we were out there a while, and it was one of the coolest hikes I’ve ever done. The trail was pretty lush, and along the way our guide stopped to point out several different animals: crabs, sloths, a raccoon, and some rather large iguanas (one circled in red in a pic below). Since the trail is near the beach, it’s all sand, and was well worth the walk. It would have been awesome to spend some time at the beach, but we’ll save that for another trip down there. Again, it was an absolutely stunning hike.

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Those stops pretty much covered the day. As mentioned, we also stopped at a small stand to try some local plantains, which I actually enjoyed. Surprising since I despise bananas. Anyway, after arriving back in the port area, we decided to walk around town and do some shopping. Despite the warnings on a specific cruise forums site, we never felt unsafe walking around, and everyone we encountered was friendly. Yet another stop we’d like to go back and spend more time at!

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Packing for a Cruise

One thing we’ve gotten pretty efficient at over the years is packing. My wife and I maintain separate packing lists with quite a bit of overlap, which is probably somewhat inefficient, but it helps us ensure we don’t forget anything major. I also tend to go over mine two or three times *after* I pack to be sure I didn’t miss anything :). I figured I’d post our combined list in the event it helps anyone looking for cruise packing tips. Have something on your list that’s not on mine? Add it in the comments!

Electronics:

  • Camera gear: I take my Nikon DSLR, lenses and chargers in case I really need them, but the gear doesn’t leave the bag much after getting my Nokia Lumia 1020 last year.
  • Cell phone and charger. The phone stays in airplane mode, but as hinted above, the camera in it is outstanding 🙂
  • GorillaPod and Lumia 1020 camera grip
  • GoPro gear: Including charger, memory cards, dive housing, floaty back door and anti-fog inserts. The inserts are essential in places with high humidity, and you should have extra inserts to swap out during the trip
  • Power strips: We’ve been taking two of these Belkin travel strips with us the past few cruises. They work really well and we never have issues with them being pulled from the luggage
  • 2 pairs of sunglasses: I always take a backup pair in case something happens to my primary pair
  • Laptop & charger: Note that I only take this if I really need it for some reason, as I hate lugging the additional weight (photo backup is about the only reason)
  • iPad & charger: In addition, I always load up a couple of books in the Kindle app to read during any downtime on sea days
  • Load up some music on my phone to listen to while reading, or during morning runs (yea, right :))
  • Waterproof camera case as a backup in the event the GoPro has issues (this came from experience). I’ve got an older version of this AquaPac, which holds any of our phones

Clothes:

  • Pants
  • Shorts
  • T-shirts
  • Undershirts
  • Dinner shirts
  • Socks / underwear
  • Bathing suits (usually two or three)
  • Pajamas
  • A light jacket or hoodie for cool nights

Shoes:

  • Sandals (usually two pairs)
  • One pair tennis shoes
  • Water sandals, which come in handy for any excursions where you may get wet or muddy (ATV/dune buggy tours, for example)
  • Dinner shoes

Random Stuff:

  • PASSPORTS!!!
  • Toiletries
  • Snorkeling gear. We generally drive to ports, so I don’t have to worry about fitting this in to checked luggage
  • Door organizer to hold all kinds of random items. Ours looks something like this
  • Medication, including any aspirin, ibuprofen, allergy pills, etc
  • Ponchos, just in case it’s raining while you’re in port somewhere
  • Downy wrinkle releaser
  • Zip lock bags. Good for packing wet bathing suits in for the flight or ride home. Also useful for storing snacks to take off o the ship (where allowed)
  • Extra hangers – Some lines will provide them if asked if you don’t want to carry your own
  • Sunscreen

  • Hot/Cold cup with a lid. That way you don’t have to keep refilling up their little cups with water, lemonade, juice, and coffee or ice tea

  • Post-it notes – good for leaving quick notes in the room for family members

  • Cash for on-shore purchases / tipping (including small bills)

  • Nightlight

  • Highlighter so you can highlight the interesting things to do in the ship’s dailies.

  • Duct tape- Many uses for this from fixing a broken suitcase to taping the drawers closed when there is bad weather.
  • Towel clips similar to these Boca clips
  • Old used gift card in case the in-room safe is card-controlled.
  • Waterproof money/card/ID holder similar to this for beach or rainy port days
  • Lanyard for those who find it easier to carry your ship ID card around your neck
  • Hat or visor

I think that about covers it, but if I find that I left anything off, I’ll add it later! Oh, and if this seems like overkill, it may very well be, but it works for us. We did take t0o many clothes this past trip somehow. My wife ended up with almost half a suitcase of stuff she didn’t wear 🙂

Choosing a Cruise

Now that I’m done with posts on our last cruise, I figured I’d walk through our selection process for choosing one. This is something that has evolved over the past few years as we’ve visited more ports, had more sea days, and really taken a look at what it is we like about cruising. Note that these are all subjective and obviously won’t be the same for everyone. We want to get the best bang for our buck and visit places we’ve never been, so we’re not really loyal to one line. We certainly don’t choose a cruise based on loyalty programs, as we like to get a taste of all lines and experience the different things they have to offer while enjoying our time together. So how do we choose? Going in order of importance:

 

Itinerary

This always comes first when we start looking. We weed out the vast majority of cruises in the first couple of days based on itinerary alone, and usually end up with 6-8 cruises that we spend the next few days applying other criteria to. While a cruise we select might go to one or two ports we’ve already been to, we’ve never repeated an entire itinerary. That’s not to say we won’t, and we certainly have a couple in mind we’d like to repeat, it’s just that we like to visit new ports whenever possible.

When reviewing itineraries, we also look at the number of sea days. All three of us enjoy those days at sea, as they provide plenty of time to unwind. The best itineraries in our eyes provide a good balance of sea days and ports, as we find having several ports back to back can make things run together and be tiring. Our favorite cruise to date provided an outstanding mix of ports and sea days, and that was our 2011 Thanksgiving cruise on the Carnival Freedom. That itinerary consisted of:

  • Leave Ft Lauderdale
  • Sea day
  • Cozumel, Mexico
  • Sea day
  • Limon, Costa Rica
  • Colon, Panama
  • Sea day
  • Sea day
  • Arrive Ft Lauderdale

Only having two back to back stops was great, and we loved having two sea days on the end to decompress. Having stops in Costa Rica and Panama was outstanding as well, we loved both stops as I hope I properly expressed in my reviews of both ports.

As another part of our itinerary hunt, we generally hit the “ports of call” forums on Cruise Critic to get an idea of what types of activities people do at a given stop, and to get an idea of what the port area is like.

 

Price

Once we have a few cruises on the list based on itinerary, we start to narrow that down by price. The list usually includes at least 2 or 3 cruise lines, as we don’t cruise for loyalty benefits, so we can usually knock it down further pretty quickly based on price. Now that’s not to say we’re always going with the cheapest cruise, it’s more about combining this with the next item, cabin selection. It just so happens that three of the four previous cruises we’ve done have been on Carnival, and it’s due in large part to what we could get in an itinerary and cabin selection within our budget.

 

Cabin Selection

This and price go hand in hand for us. I spend hours pouring over cabin options to try and get us in to the perfect cabin within our budget. I’m definitely not one who’s happy just booking and seeing where we our room is after we board, I do as much research as possible on a cabin before I book. I’ll go into more detail on cabin selection in a different post, but when we’re booking, I’ll be looking to get the best cabin I can within our price range, so if we decide we want to be in a particular section of the ship, like the upper few decks forward, for example, I narrow our list down further based on available cabins and pricing in that section of the ship. Honestly, this part has been a major factor in two of our past three Thanksgiving cruises not being on Royal Caribbean, as we’re not as fond of the layout of their upper decks. I’ll be sure to cover that in my cabin selection post as well.

 

On Board Activities

As part of our enjoyment of sea days, we like to make sure that the ships we’re looking at are active ones. We’ll spend a bunch of time reading through past reviews, as well as different forums for each line, to see what people have to say about the activities on board. I’ll admit that we did give this one less importance in booking the Summit to Bermuda, as our cruise line choices based on the dates we had available were slim, and there was no way I could have talked my wife and daughter in to sailing NCL again (a topic for another post :)). This last one aside, we’ve learned that the energy on a ship during the sea days is an important factor for us. Now, I do take my sources of information with a grain of salt, especially posts in cruise forums. It seems boards like those on Cruise Critic have turned in to a place where people either spend their time complaining about their chosen line’s loyalty program, or playing “fanboy” and bashing anybody who says anything bad about their line. The most time consuming part about going through reviews and forum posts is sifting through the noise to get to the truly objective reviews.

 

Past Reviews of the Itinerary and ship

This happens in conjunction with the previous item, as we spend a bunch of time reading those reviews and forum posts to see what people thought of the stops and the ship. I will say that this isn’t an exact science, and we do learn from our mistakes here. Our 2012 Thanksgiving cruise on the Carnival Legend was a perfect example, as the majority of the reviewers seemed to love the ship, and many had cruised multiple times specifically because of how much they liked it. I have to say, none of us agreed. It never seemed crowded, which was a plus, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to sail on it again unless it was a really solid itinerary.

 

I think that about covers it for us. People choose cruises for varying reasons, but my biggest tip here is to know what you want out of your time on board, and book the appropriate itinerary and cruise line accordingly. While I get the desire to be spontaneous, these things aren’t cheap, so I like to know what I’m getting myself in to before I drop the money on it. In cases like this last cruise where we really wanted to see Bermuda, we’ll adjust some of the other priorities accordingly, but for the most part I’ll stick to the criteria set forth above. Do you have additional things you look at? Feel free to add it in the comments to share with others!

As I’ve alluded to a couple of times, I’m fairly methodical when it comes to cabin selection, so my next post will give some insight into what I look for when choosing one.