The cruise seemed to be starting off well with smooth and efficient boarding (at least on the cruise line's part -- the port, on the other hand, was a nightmare). We embarked on the early side and enjoyed a pleasant lunch al fresco at the Veranda restaurant, and found our luggage waiting near our cabin by the time we finished. The delay in the arrival of the two trucks with provisions for the cruise was an omen of things to come. The trucks didn't arrive until after we were scheduled to sail, so sail away took place after 11:30 pm, instead of 6 pm.

Breakfast at Veranda was uniformly good, but the dining room tended to get crowded on mornings when a lot of passengers planned to leave the ship around the same time in the morning.

As we discovered the first morning of the cruise, the only ports where the ship docked at a pier were the ports of embarkation and disembarkation. All the other ports required tendering, mostly via Zodiacs (basically, rubber rafts with outboard motors, capacity about 15 plus crew), and at one port, via a more traditional small boat with a cabin that held about 20 people. The Windstar web site was quite silent about the tendering, and we saw a fair number of passengers struggling to get in and out of the Zodiacs (they really aren't appropriate for anyone with mobility, balance, or similar issues). Read more