On Holland America, the passengers are not required to carry their life jackets to the muster drill. Should a real emergency occur and you cannot get your life jacket from your cabin, these are available at several places on the promenade deck. As you can see, this picture is from Statendam's cruise to French Polynesia last February. The drill will take about 20 minutes and then it will be time to release the lines and get underway. On a long cruise like this one, there are a small number of novice cruisers, so most of this is repeated information.

Glenda...those are really pretty shoes...I especially like the silver ones...although I usually pick gold over silver. I wish my feet would let me wear shoes like that...Everything but big "butt ugly" shoes hurt...."S" I hope you have as much fun on your trip as you seem to be having getting ready for it... patti

cynic do a google search on it and palladium virus... everyone is complaining about it, you get it just from visiting the site, just like cruise critic. my dh warned me about the palladium over the weeknd, since i do go there, or did, i should say. i did not go to cruisecritic.com directly from FB and do not go on FB at work because i am a puter security snob and know the security at work is pathetic. i suspect the network because while scanning my wk puter i found infected internet temps files from our other location w/ that employees profile id. they know it's not me since there is a log & puter record of all activity. it was the same malware and viruses on all other puters these 2 kids used over the last 6 months. we all have the same passwords so everyone can jump on any puter :-/ i also completely cleaned mine up last friday but on monday some things were back... this business is owned by 4 brothers who just learned how to txt and email, isn't that the most pathetic?! they do not understand anything about computers and believe the computer guy is too expensive and always trying to sell them something. they are plant growers not business people. our server is 5+ yrs old, often needs to be taken down, has 2 many users and too many users surfing the net w/o protection. we are also using a Great Plains (Pains) version from 2002 LOL and slowly loosing data over time, they just think someone is deleting it but no one is, our system is too old and corrupt. my puter which is from 1999 has been going bad slowly, i'm the one responsible for shipping $10 mil of plants which is about 85% of our income and i was told by the office manager (daughter of an owner) to figure out how to back up my email and contacts for when it does go bad LOL. it does not have a dvd drive and i'm not sticking a jump drive of mine on it LOL! it sooo sad all i can do is laugh about it... and thank gawd i'm only there thru the rest of the yr hopefully ~ liz

I want to send my elderly father and his wife on a cruise to celebrate his birthday. Do any of you know of any fantastic deals? I was thinking of a 7 day cruise to possibly the Mexican Rivera or??? Regarding the time frame...possibly March. Thanks