Aug
14
Over the years, as well as online, I have discovered some helpful items to take on cruises. Some of them would be more obvious than others (especially for experienced cruisers). Here’s a list of what I’ve found useful:
- Bungee cord – if you have a balcony stateroom, you can use this to keep the balcony door open at night to get a nice breeze. This obviously depends on the type of door your room has.
- Power strip – it doesn’t necessarily have to be a surge protector. Just a strip for extra outlets. A lot of ships only have one standard and one foreign outlet. So by bringing some extra outlets of your own, you can keep the clock (see below) plugged in while you charge your iPod or charge your phone.
- Water bottles – some cruise lines allow you to bring water on board. We’re fine with the tap water available on board, but for excursions or walking around off the ship, it’s a lot cheaper than buying the $5 bottles of water they sell on the ship. Alternatively, if you’re flying or don’t feel like carrying the extra weight, you can just bring an empty water/sports bottle that you’ll fill before you get off the ship.
- Shampoo – if you don’t want to use the ship’s shampoo, bring your own.
- Clock – as I mentioned earlier, bring your own clock. For some reason, none of the ships (at least that I’ve been on) have clocks in the staterooms. This certainly puzzles me. It seems like something that would be essential. Whatever the reasoning though, there are no clocks in the staterooms, so if you want to know what time it is when you wake up in the morning, bring your own clock.
- Laptop – I would only recommend this if you plan on sending a lot of e-mails throughout the cruise. The reason I recommend this is because the Internet is always very slow on the ship, so if at all possible, you should type of up your e-mail prior to connecting to the Internet. So when you do sign on, all you have to do is paste your e-mail and send it and not waste your time typing. You could consider this a bit cheap or something, but at 75 cents a minute, I think it’s wise to do this.
That is what I can think of off the top of my head. If I think of more, I’ll add them next time. If anyone has any more hints, add them too.
Our last cruise in August we took bath sponges with us since the cruise lines have now gone to the liquid soap. Liquid soap and wash clothes just doesn’t work very well. The sponges were only a dollar and at the end of the cruise we just trashed them.