The itinerary for this cruise features several favorite islands, as well as a couple we've only visited once or twice before, and one we've never been to.
December 7: Fort Lauderdale
December 8: Half Moon Cay, Holland America's private beach resort on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas
December 9: Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos
December 10: Samana, Dominican Republic
December 11: At Sea
December 12: Bonaire
December 13: Curaçao (with an 11pm departure!)
December 14: Aruba
December 15: At Sea
December 16: At Sea
December 17: Fort Lauderdale- disembark and re-board the Emerald Princess
I had mistakenly said that we visited Grenada on this itinerary, but we don't. You can see that we selected this cruise solely for its 10-night schedule exactly mirroring the Emerald's dry dock. Itinerary didn't even enter into our decision process. Wherever it went, we were going too.
We've been on Holland America (HAL) only twice before, for back to back cruises on the Maasdam. We thoroughly enjoyed those 24 nights. HAL offers quite a different experience than Princess, simply because their ships are so much smaller than most of Princess's ships.
The biggest difference for us, though, is the fact that we get virtually no benefits in HAL as we get for being Elite on Princess. No free laundry (and not even self-serve laundries), no free minibar setup, no priority tendering and embarkation...and, most horrifying, no free Internet. We're going to try to make do without, finding wifi in a few of the ports to see us through. We already know that we can get wifi in Bonaire, $2.50 for 15 minutes. G used it and said it was every bit as fast as our high-speed Internet at home. If it's that fast, 15 or 30 minutes should be plenty.
I will continue to blog each day, and will submit all the prepared posts when I once again have wifi. My next post might not be published until Bonaire on December 12, and then possibly not again until we return to Fort Lauderdale on December 17.
It's like being on the dark side of the moon for 10 days.
;-)