The Best First Day Itinerary on the Symphony of the Seas After 7 cruises, most recently on the Royal Caribbean Symphony of the Seas, I am prepared to declare myself a bit of a cruise expert. I’ve scoured each and every ship, tasted nearly all the food, did almost all […]
So the cabin door slammed behind us. It was midday, it was fine. We collapsed onto our respective beds, me a king in the air in front of the 46″ flat screen embedded into the wall; her a twin trundle on the floor by the balcony facing Italian islands our […]
Our first 5 hours on board were spent fretting over the luggage American Air didn’t load onto our plane to Barcelona Friday night. Not the ideal beginning. The teen, to her credit, kept the faith while I imagined isolating between two outfits for the next 7 days…and doing a little […]
I walked away. I’ve been doing this more often of late. Leaving my family on a park bench in Bar Harbor’s bucolic Village Green, with ice cream cones in hand, I set off down Albert Meadow in search of two scoops of private tranquility, away from the sound of other people’s […]
There I was, at 6:45 on a balmy Wednesday morning in mid-July, not quite ‘up and at ’em’, squeezing myself into a thick wet suit, 5mm for better buoyancy to make a passive swim with manatees more of a reality; second skin if I were a walrus. My private manatee […]
The first thing you notice, after alternating between frigid blasts of conditioned air in the main lobby and elevator vestibule, and stumbling around with foggy glasses courtesy of a courtyard flooded with sunlight and humidity, and outdoor motel-style hallways connecting the guest rooms, is the view; a cool million if […]
Nobody would’ve had him in their hideous death pool for he was brazen and bold, unabashedly unorthodox, and achieved fame on his own terms. He was punk rock. He had overcome his demons, earning streetcred by dashing through the mist left by the ghosts of poor choices. He was in […]
My new Family Vacation Critic article is all about cruising and cruise ships! Because once upon a time, cruising was little more than a fun mode of transportation, a floating bottomless buffet with which a family could explore several exotic locales in a single helping of precious vacation time. Nowadays, […]
