We've been doing other kinds of holiday that we've absolutely loved and which have involved none of the hassles of cruising. And let's be honest - cruising, and especially fly-cruising, does involve hassles. Limited luggage, airports, queues and delays, altered itineraries and missed ports of call, being turned out of your cabin on the final day at an unearthly hour, and other people - lots of them!
But almost as soon as we'd arrived in Barbados, our resolve began to weaken. And after a few days the pros were heavily outweighing the cons. Wonderful islands, hot weather and idyllic beaches made us want to return yet again, so we are! I should perhaps mention that cruising is the only realistic way (for us anyway) to visit several islands in one week, and that TUI / Marella is the only desirable company (for us anyway) with whom to do it.
We picked up a brochure from Explorer's Cruise Shop and found exactly what we wanted. TUI will be acquiring another ex-Celebrity ship (Celebrity Century) soon and she'll be named Marella Explorer 2. The itinerary in the period just before Christmas suited us perfectly:
Marella's Caribbean cruises are based in Barbados and Jamaica. In our humble opinion, Barbados is brilliant and Jamaica is to be avoided at all costs, so that was a good start. We haven't been to Aruba or Bonaire, so that was great. And it'll be nearly ten years since we last visited Curacao and Grenada, both of which we really liked, so that was great too.
We were very happy indeed to see that Explorer 2 will be adult-only. There were hundreds of children (about 200?) on Explorer last week - I realise it was the school holidays and next year it'll be the week before schools break up, but I still expect lots of parents to be taking their children out of school for the sake of a cheaper holiday. And the week before Christmas is indeed cheaper! The clincher was realising that we could have an Executive Suite (almost 500sq.ft.) for just a couple of hundred pounds more than the balcony cabin we were in last week - we'd already decided that if we did another cruise, we'd want a bigger cabin!
So that's it... we haven't given up cruising after all.
I suspect the 'image of Explorer 2' on the TUI website is a mock-up or perhaps it's of the bigger and slightly different Marella Explorer, so here's the ship in her Celebrity livery:
(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
