New Port Every Cruise
When we walked in our travel agent’s office so many years ago now to book our first cruise, we told her we wanted to go somewhere warm, and we told her our budget. She picked our first cruise itinerary without any input from us. Our first cruise was the Carnival Sensation, sailing 7 nights from Tampa to the western Caribbean ports of Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Nassau. Here’s one of formal portraits from that first cruise to just give those of you who know us an idea of how long ago that was and how much we’ve changed.
We came back from that cruise addicted. We had finally found a vacation that was fun and relaxing for both of us. Instead of calling my travel agent though, I got online to research ships and itineraries to find where I wanted to go next, and then I always called my wonderful travel agent to handle all the booking details for us. One of our cruising rules was that we wanted to visit at least one new port on every cruise. We did this for many cruises and many years, until we wanted to cruise with some friends who wanted to cruise an itinerary we already sailed before. We’ve only broken that rule a few times, but always for a good reasons. The main reason we have that rule is there are so many beautiful, exciting, and interesting places to visit, we’re just not ready to go back to the same itineraries over and over again. We have a few friends who sail the same itineraries over and over again, because the ship is the destination for them. We enjoy the shipboard experience, but we love seeing a new place.
There’s a few ports we love to visit regularly – Cozumel, San Juan, and, St. Thomas, to name a few. And, there are some we’d love to go back for an extended land visit – Barbados, Dominican Republic, and Antigua, to name a few of those. And, only a few that we feel like we’ve been there, done that, with no need to return – and I’m not going to name those!
We’ve got lots of places on our list to visit. As I mentioned a few days ago, Roger loves the Caribbean, so I’ve had trouble luring him away from there, but we’re headed to Alaska in 2011. A few years later, we’ll have to do a cruise to the Norwegian fjords, because I’ve been told that’s like Alaska on steroids, and I need to see that for myself. We haven’t take any cruises overseas yet, because we felt like we needed at least 10 days and probably more to justify the time and expense for those trips. And, we weren’t prepared to be gone from home that long with our youngest daughter still in school. But, with her headed off to college, a whole new world is opened to us for cruising, places like Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Venice, and Istanbul. We have friends in New Zealand who we’ve promised to visit so Australia/New Zealand is on our short list as well. And, we’re definitely planning to head to the South Pacific for a romantic Princess cruise through the French Polynesian islands.