Our cruise out of Houston was delayed about 18 hours. Though they blamed the delay on traffic in the channel, then weather, the fact is that the ship was still being provisioned more than three hours after we were supposed to leave. Our scheduled departure time of 4:00 would have been impossible considering that trucks were still lined up and being offloaded after 7:00. Add to this a pallet of champagne was dropped on the pier as well as one of tomatoes was tipped over, the level of incompetence at Houston was unmatched by any port we have sailed out of. Then there was the pallet of luggage that was dropped into the water. It was recovered, but the people affected weren't told what happened until their soaked bags were delivered to their door. Two people in our group were affected, so I saw very closely how this was handled. Once the proper supervisors were notified, they did take care of cleaning..oh and a bottle of wine for the inconvenience.

After all of our delays, we finally left on Monday morning about 10:30. Our first stop in Honduras was cancelled, so Costa Maya in Mexico was added. The docking there was aborted because of the weather.

Our next stop was in Belize. Somehow, even with our cancelled port the day before we were late. Most of the water based shore excursions were cancelled because of the weather, but that was to be expected. We were able to book a tour on the pier. Read more