We followed our usual procedure of booking through our NCL Personal Cruise Consultant. Over the years, she has become more than an efficient and knowledgeable cruise consultant. She is, now, considered a trusted family member. She knows our likes and dislikes better than we and is ever ready to take those idiosyncratic little questions that always occur between booking and sailing.

Living in the Midwest (Chicago), travel to and from the cruise is more complicated for us than those lucky people who reside near embarkation cities. To reduce travel costs, we take two BIG B2B2B+ cruises per year of 2 or 3 weeks each. Also, we alternate between air and train travel, in order to use frequent flyer miles for our plane travel. In the same vein, we visit the embarkation and disembarkation cities for several days.

For this trek, we opted to take Amtrak from Chicago to New York City on the "Lake Shore Limited", departing at 9pm on Friday and arriving in the Big Apple at 6:30 pm on Saturday. We took a bedroom compartment which was comfortable and provided enough room to relax while alternating between enjoying the scenery and scrabble. complimented with our BYO wine. The daylight travel along the Hudson river was magnificent. For the price of a taxi, we pr-booked a private car service (Dial 7) to meet us at the Pennsylvania station which we learned about through the Cruise Critic thread. Read more