Your Cruise Director Speaks

I’ve never taken a cruise, but have learned a lot about them from Wendy Perrin’s insights in both Conde Nast Traveler magazine and her blog Perrin Post. She ran a blog series fairly recently about the frustrations of taking her family on a big cruise ship and finding that some things didn’t quite deliver.

In fact, it was that series that really got me reading her blog and ultimately led to our meeting this past weekend at the SOBCon 07 blogging conference, with lots of gabbing and a fun dinner with her in Chicago. She’s such a wealth of knowledge.

If you want to read about cruising straight from the “bridge of the ship,” take a look at John Heald’s blog.

He’s the Cruise Director of the Carnival Freedom, and he takes the time to answer guest questions and offer anecdotes and stories. There’s even a Blogger’s Cruise aboard his ship in January 2008….hmmmm. 🙂

My previous cruises have been aboard gray Navy ships, mostly to the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, Western Pacific and Mediterranean, but I did post here about a memorable trip through the Panama Canal.

Here’s a great time-lapse video of a Panama Canal transit from the bow of a ship going through from the Atlantic to the Pacific….

The next quest is to figure out how to embed an actual video box into this post — apparently I’m in search of something called an API Key to do so. One of the inspirations from the great SOBCon bloggers was using video and podcasts, so look for me to try to figure that out over the next few months.

Technorati tags: family travel, travel, cruise, blogging