Cruising Rox!

2007 is a vintage year for round-the-world cruises, but which boat is best to circumnavigate the globe?

As anyone who has recently been on a cruise to St. Thomas or St. Maarten knows, an ever-expanding roster of cruise ships is creating traffic jams in many popular destinations.

Cruise lines realize that people are looking for more variety and bragging rights, which is why in the next year you're going to see a lot of places off the well-sailed route showing up on itineraries, as well as the arrival of a new generation of ships designed to visit smaller, less-visited ports. Here are trends and new destinations to look for:

Read more at The Globe and Mail

PICTURE the happy scene. It's the blushing bride's big day. She walks down the aisle to the waiting groom while in the congregation proud parents beam as the couple tie the knot.

However, these days it is sometimes a seamen's knot that binds the bride and groom together as more and more couples opt for a wedding at sea and this is big business for many Southampton based cruise ships.

So far this year almost 200 couples have been married on the city's ships and this number is set to keep on rising.

Read more at This Is Hampshire

Cruise ship company P&O has announced the launch of its new £300m superliner, The Ventura.

The ship, which will carry 3,600 passengers and 1,200 crew, will be designed specifically for British holidaymakers with an emphasis on fine dining, modern and contemporary art and family entertainment.

Read more at Caterer Search

Prime minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit, is to meet with evangelical leaders in the tiny Caribbean island to seek their advice about allowing gay cruises to dock there.

There are no restrictions on the gay tours but religious leaders have expressed concerns.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another Cecil’s World in Print. My wife and I just returned from our first cruise. The seven-day cruise took us to beautiful Bermuda. With this being my first cruise, I was not prepared for the rough water on the way over and on the way back. I know now the Gulf Stream is rough this time of year.

If you have never been on a cruise, you need to do it. It was relaxing, and the best part about it? There was food all the time. You could eat from 6 a.m. to after midnight. I was like a kid in a candy store. I was going from deck to deck, checking out all the food. My favorite was chocolate night. The entire restaurant was set up with everything chocolate. Nearly 50 different types of treats garnished four buffet lines with wall-to-wall people. I think all 1,300 people on the cruise turned out for this event.

Read more at the SC Now

The dark, furry little guy just ran around having a hissy fit while a trainer in his outdoor pen teased him with a bone. With the head of a pit bull and the rear end of a opossum (he is a distant cousin in the marsupial family), Rudy didn't look at all like his cartoon counterpart.

Read more at the Daily Bulletin

The port cruises into high gear with world records, more ships, new amenities.

Just before Christmas, Port Everglades is expected to sail into a berth in the record books.

On Dec. 23, port officials expect an estimated 46,000 passengers to pass through its terminals.

''That will be a new world record held by Port Everglades,'' Port Director Phillip Allen said. Port Everglades holds the existing record, too. In 2003, 44,000 passengers cleared their terminals in one day.

HICKORY - Jerry and Doris Payseur were expecting to go on a relaxing two-week cruise to Europe. What they got was one of the worst viral stomach illnesses.

The Hickory couple left Sunday, April 23. By Tuesday, Jerry was feeling the beginnings of the virus.

“My stomach was uneasy, then I had diarrhea, nausea and vomiting all at once,” he said. “I managed to go about 12 hours before I had to go to the ship’s infirmary, where they gave me a shot to help with it.”

Minister of Transport Sturla Bödvarsson announced this morning that the government is going to increase funding for road construction projects through 2010 to improve Iceland’s road system.

The announcement was made at a meeting organized by the Federation of Trade and Services this morning. This story is reported on mbl.is.

Read more at Iceland Review

News that cruise tourism may become a reality on Cayman Brac is welcomed.

And not.

It is a given that many Brackers want to see cruise ship visitors come to their shores.

There is no doubt that cruises to the Brac would create jobs and help bolster the economy.

Read more at The Cayman Compass

Paradise Caribbean Cruise Lines is trying to pull its business plan together in time to start short cruises out of Port Canaveral in late-January.

The fledgling Orlando-based operation originally planned to start cruises this month, but a deal to acquire a ship called the Orient Queen fell through last summer, said Jeffrey Hentz, the cruise line's chief marketing officer.

Read more at Florida Today

After a recent decline in the number of new ships entering service, the pace is picking up.

Eight new ships - each carrying more than 2,000 passengers - will come on line in 2007. All but one will look familiar. That's because seven of the eight are clones of existing ships.

Only one, Cunard's Queen Victoria, is not a copy of another ship, though it is adopting many features of its sister royals, the 70,000-ton Queen Elizabeth 2 and the 151,000-ton Queen Mary 2.

Read more at the San Jose Mercury-News

Carnival’s Fantasy puts the fun back into sailing out of New Orleans. Slightly more than a year following Hurricane Katrina, the cruise line’s year-round cruises started again in October, and they are part of the Big Easy’s renewal. And it’s easy going all the way — with a capital “E.”

During a four-day cruise out of New Orleans last week, I re-discovered the joy of letting go, doing nothing and making new friends.

Read more at The Advocate

Passengers on the Carnival Liberty returned to shore, most recovered from a virus that left many sick for part of the voyage.

The 16-day cruise was supposed be a transatlantic voyage with passengers sunning themselves and lounging on the lido deck.

But for nearly 700 of the Carnival Liberty's passengers and crew, it was more about vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps and faintness.

The company said the canceled cruise would reduce earnings by about 2 cents per share, though it didn't specify in which fiscal period.

Read the full press release at Yahoo Finance

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined the Carnival Liberty cruise ship to look into the outbreak of a gastrointestinal illness.

Investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined the last leg of the Carnival Liberty's cruise in St. Maarten on Thursday to probe a gastrointestinal outbreak that hit more than 600 passengers and crew over the past 13 days.

The outbreak on the 110,000-ton cruise ship, which is slated to arrive in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday, is among the largest in recent memory, according to the CDC.

Read more at The Miami Herald

Regent Seven Seas Cruises, voted the world's #1 large-ship cruise line by readers of Condé Nast Traveler, announces more than 75 Alaskan land adventures for 2007. Guests sailing aboard the 700-guest all-suite, all-balcony Seven Seas Mariner between Vancouver and Seward, Alaska can enjoy exciting port excursions ranging from touring an authentic Gold Rush boomtown to listening in on the underwater calls of whales and porpoises using a high-tech hydrophone.

Each Alaskan excursion is designed for a group of eight or fewer guests, ensuring the personalized experience for which Regent voyages are known. Highlights for 2007 include:

Read more at eTravel Blackboard

OLYMPIA, Wash. The state Ecology Department has fined Celebrity Cruises 100-thousand dollars for the ship Mercury discharging half a (m) million gallons of untreated wastewater in Washington waters.

Silversea's flagship luxury cruise ship Silver Whisper arrived in Asia this month for the first time. Silver Whisper will be based in Asia for an extended season from November 2006 to February 2007 offering voyages ranging from 9 to 15 nights based to or from Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong.

On its maiden voyage to Asia, the ultra-luxurious all-suite Silver Whisper arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, 15 November, in Singapore on 16 November and in Hong Kong on 27 November 2006.

Read more at Asia Travel Tips

All eyes will be trained on the horizon when the biggest ship to ever call in to Australia makes port in Sydney amidst fireworks on the 20th of February 2007 in her only Australian stop.

Queen Mary 2 is one heavy lady, weighing in at a mighty 151,400 tons and will rendezvous with ‘smaller’ sister ship, the 1,900-passenger ship Queen Elizabeth 2. This rare sight is sure to attract a large crowd of onlookers at Sydney Harbour.

Read more at eTravel Backboard

San Juan.– Carnival Cruise Lines’ 2,758-passenger Carnival Triumph will operate a new four-port seven-day “Exotic Eastern Caribbean” itinerary from Miami beginning April 2007 that features a combination of diverse and captivating ports of call.

Stops on the itinerary include Half Moon Cay, a Bahamian private island; San Juan, Puerto Rico; St. Thomas, U.S.V.I.; and Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands, the Caribbean’s newest port of call.

Read more at Dominican Today

Considered the "pride of United Arab Emirates," Dubai's flourishing tourism is attracting the attention of today's most sophisticated travelers. Located midway between Europe and the Far East, Dubai bridges exotic destinations on four new Crystal itineraries:

Read the full press release at Yahoo Finance

Youngsters ages 17 and under sail free (except for government fees and taxes) on all of the line's Mediterranean and Northern Europe itineraries. when sharing a stateroom with two paying guests Cruise-only rates, which are dependent on stateroom category and sailing, begin at $795 per person, double occupancy.

Read the full press release at Yahoo Finance

Lawsuit raises asbestos concerns

ALANG, India - The SS Norway, once one of America's premier cruise ships, stands on death's edge off the coast of rural India, a battleground in the international struggle over the controversial practice of ship breaking.

Permanently laid up by a 2003 boiler-room explosion that killed eight crew members in Miami, the ship was towed halfway around the world to India and run aground at Alang, a six-mile stretch of beach that's the world's largest ship-scrapping yard.

We love to hike but thought the serious pursuit of the hobby incompatible with our fondness for cruising.

We were wrong.

The longtime leader in footloose adventure travel, Butterfield & Robinson, has artfully combined hiking and biking with small-ship sailings along secluded coastlines and islands from Athens to Antarctica.

Read more atr Philly.com

Royal Caribbean Cruises joins six universities to launch an onboard international studies program next fall that will take graduates and undergraduates around the world.

College study abroad is taking a distinct turn for the (more) exotic.

Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises is helping launch The Scholar Ship, an ocean vessel that will ferry some 600 college students on a 16-week academic voyage to ports like Lisbon, Portugal; Papeete, Tahiti; Sydney, Australia; and Shanghai, China.

Read more at The Miami Herald