Is The Thrill Gone ?????

[venice]

I was looking at pictures of the Carnival Freedom sailing out of Venice on it's first cruise this past week and at first was very excited (after all it was sailing out of my favorite city in the world)..but then on second reflection for the most part after one gets over the "new ship" smell associations, it's much like any other conquest style ship in design and layout and the luster started to wear off for me

I can understand the excitement surrounding RCI Freedom because of all the new innovations, but most of the new ships don't present any really creative innovations. Then I started to look at the European ports of call for the Carnival Freedom and I began to have a sense that if the trends continue the European ports will be overwhelmed with cruisers from the mega ships much the same way Cozumel is today which I think takes away from the overall cruising experience. With intense ports of call in Europe there is not a whole lot of time to enjoy the mega ships onboard experiences.

Are you one of those types of cruisers that when possible try to cruise on a new ship because it is new even if it has the same basic layout of cruise ships that you have been on before

For those of you that have cruised thru Europe on a mega ship, did you have a sense that the size of the ships overwhelmed the smaller ports that you have visited (i.e. Santorini). I really missed Sun Line (Royal Olympic) because of their smaller ships and Greek crews when I cruised Greece

[Mean Dean]

Venice,

This is completely off-topic.......

But, a Royal Olympic ship was featured in the cruise movie, "Boat Trip", and featured a stop on the Greek island of Hydra.

Dean