My 22 year old daughter and myself (42) went on the Crown Princess Cruise leaving New York and going to Bermuda, San Juan, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk on August 1-10th. We chose this cruise because I wanted to spend some time in New York beforehand as I had never been there before.

New York was a vacation in itself. We did everything we could in the two days we were there. We caught a cab from the airport ($40 with tip)--stand in the taxi line. There will be lots of men asking for you to take their short van/taxi, but we thought we would stay in the legitimate yellow taxi line. Just ignore them and they go away. Being polite didn't work. Ok, well we stayed at the Hilton on 6th Ave. Worth every penny, but sooo much money! We got to see John Travolta and Robin Williams taping "Old Dogs" right down the street from the hotel--I have pictures to prove it:-) We went to the Empire State Building (worth it to buy the Express Pass online first). We had dinner at the Rainbow Room--not worth the money at all. We went to see "Rent" and my daughter loved it--I couldn't really get into it. We went on a carriage ride in Central Park and went on a Harbor Cruise from Battery Park. And the most fun we had was shopping Bloomingdale's 40% off sales:-) All in all, New York was a wonderful pre-cruise vacation!

Embarkation--We had a car service (a black Lincoln) pick us up at the Hilton for $50 which was really inexpensive I thought. He took us over the Brooklyn Bridge to the cruise pier. We found a porter right away (I tipped him $5) to take care of our luggage. We quickly were on board and found our cabin right away. It was the same as the cabin we had last year on the Caribbean Princess. I chose the Caribe deck because of the large balcony. Read more