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My most recent additions are from a 10-day cruise to the southern Caribbean that I took with my wife Kimberly, my sister Mary and my new brother-in-law Scott a month ago. This was our wedding gift to them, and it only took about 14 months to agree on the details!
We took Norwegian Cruise Lines' Norwegian Gem from New York to St. Thomas USVI; Antigua; Barbados; St. Maartens; and Tortola BVI before returning to New York.
This was the fourth cruise for Kimberly and me, and the first for Mary and Scott. NCL really hypes what they call Freestyle Cruising TM; it's even painted on the outside of the ship. Its main feature is the elimination of formal dinner seatings and letting you select from a set of restaurants (Italian, French, Japanese, American, etc) whenever they're open. Reservations are helpful but not essential. As a backup, one of the cafeterias is always open. Others may disagree, but I've always liked cafeterias: they're fast, and you can sample a little of everything if you want.
I have to say that NCL's hype is justified; this is a big improvement over our previous cruises. I dislike having to eat at fixed times and in assigned seats on most other cruise lines, and I truly loathe "formal nights". Vacations aren't supposed to be more regimented than your regular life back home! During our third cruise, on the Costa Mediterranea from Venice to the eastern Mediterranean in 2004, I went hungry more than once because the dinner food that night was so terrible and no other restaurants were open during dinner hours.
The ship has about 600 food service workers for about 2400 passengers. I don't know if that's a higher ratio than other lines, but if it is, it's worth it. Cruises revolve around food, so it has to be done right.
The Norwegian Gem is only about a year old. It's a monster, 90,000+ tons, typical of the newer cruise ships being built these days in Europe (this one was built in Papenburg Germany). I'm not all that fond of mega-ships, as the experience is somewhat like being trapped in a Las Vegas hotel, but I have to admit it's nice to not feel too cooped up when you spend several straight days at sea (it was 2.5 days each way from NYC to the Caribbean and back).
Partly because of those sea days, and partly because of the East Coast weather I wasn't particularly excited by our choice of New York as the terminus. But we did this as a wedding present for my sister and brother-in-law who live in the Washington DC area, and this made it convenient for them. We also bought last-minute photography supplies at B&H in New York. I lived in Northern New Jersey from 1982-1991 and often visited New York, but that place was still a new experience for me. The four of us brought back 6,100 pictures totaling 47 gigabytes. But why not? There's no more film to buy and process, so there's basically no cost to a digital picture other than the wear and tear on the camera and its battery. You don't (or shouldn't) bring back very many tangible things from a vacation besides pictures, and you can't go back and take the shot you wish you'd taken. No matter how many pictures I take, I often wish I'd taken even more.
Speaking of photography, on our first cruise (on the defunct Stella Solaris out of Athens to the eastern Mediterranean in 2000) I heard a talk by a very accomplished photographer who had traveled the world and had accumulated an impressive portfolio in National Geographic. He asked if anyone knew the difference between an amateur photographer and a professional. It's not equipment, not when you see what some dedicated amateurs carry around. No, the main difference is that the professional doesn't show every picture he takes. Wow. He really nailed it.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the whole trip occurred before we even got to New York. We flew into Newark airport (once my home airport) and took a cab into Manhattan where we would stay in a hotel before our cruise began. I remember thinking the cab looked especially beat up, but I figured it would probably make at least one more trip before expiring. On the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, Kimberly and I began to get a little nauseous. Thinking it was the trucks in the next lane in the stop-and-go traffic, we asked the cabbie to roll up the windows. But the air only got worse. Suddenly we saw smoke pouring out of the dashboard -- it was our own car! Not knowing if this was from gasoline leaking onto the engine, I leaped out and had Kimberly dial 911. The cops came pretty quickly -- even though I didn't know exactly where we were, they could see us on TV. They told the cabbie to roll down the rest of the approach in neutral with his engine off and then pull off and wait for a tow truck. But when we got to the bottom, the cabbie waved off the tow truck and we realized that he intended to continue into the tunnel! We'd had enough of that, so we got out and the cop arranged for a NJ Transit bus to pick us up and take us to the 42nd St bus terminal where we caught a (different) cab to our hotel.
Even after converting a significant fraction of our hemoglobin to carboxyhemoglobin, the cabbie insisted on being paid! Needless to say he didn't get a tip. I still had no idea what was wrong, but my best guess was a faulty cooling system let the engine overheat and start to burn oil.
I have no idea how many taxis I've ridden in my life, but I've had only two especially bad experiences, and both were with Haitian drivers. (Kimberly's bad-taxi benchmark was the hair-raising race from the Shanghai airport to the city we took in 2002, but that one didn't bother me that much; we got there quickly, in one piece, and unpoisoned.)
I just don't know what it is about them. My previous (and first) bad experience was about four years ago in Orlando FL when I hired one to take me to a nearby hotel. The poor guy simply didn't know the area and quickly got lost. He repeatedly called his brother on the phone for help to no avail, and he even drove back to the airport at least once to talk to him in person. Finally, in absolute desperation, he stopped his cab in traffic, got out and started asking other drivers for help! I had a GPS, but I didn't know the location of the hotel and I didn't have any local maps loaded, so it wasn't too much help. Besides, one of the main reasons you hire a cab in the first place is to benefit from the drivers' experience and knowledge of the area, and that's something you really have a right to expect. Right?