Rotterdam 2002

We have been wanting to do this cruise for a while now, but they usually take place in the Fall at twice the price. Once the summer sailing's began, and the rates became more favourable for us, we decided on this voyage on the Rotterdam. We were most interested in the Canadian ports and this cruise gave us some great ports of call.
PRE-CRUISE New York City / Boston
We had a few days available to us prior to the cruise which left on a Wednesday so we spend the first few days in New York and Boston.. I had never been to New York and wanted to visit the Museums. Using Priceline.com we booked some wonderful hotels and very reasonable cost. This allowed us to stay in the Upper East Side of Manhattan across from the MET, by Central Park. Also, we were treated to a parade for Puerto Rican Day outside our hotel. We began the trip flying from Seattle on June 7th.
The hotel was very convenient, across the street from the MET.
Hotel Lobby	Metropolitan Museum of Art We spent most of the day here the first full day, it was wonderful! We especially were enthralled by the Egyptian Exhibits and the Tiffany windows.
	Our second day in New York was Puerto Rican Day The parade passed our hotel and we have a prime viewing spot, it began at 11am and kept going till about 6pm.
	It was funny to watch the bellman pull luggage through the crowd to get to the hotel, probably not much fun for him though.
The was a lot of police presence, and the crowd had a good time, probably was the safest place to be in New York at that time :)	As the parade wrapped up, there was quite a mess to be cleaned on the street, but obviously NYC has that down to a science, it wasn't long before it was all gone.

Here is Stephen checking out the Boston area map as we are riding the train from New York's Penn Station to Boston South.	"Hi Cutie, are we there yet?"
We had a lovely sunset view from our Hotel. We stayed at Swissotel a few blocks from Boston Commons. We only had one day in Boston, really, and we were getting ready for our trip but we did have time for a quick bus tour on the Trolley to see some sights.
	We arrived at the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal around noon - we still saw people off the ship getting transportation away. I think they had some delay. Fortunately we were in the early batch and were seated and served hot chocolate but we had almost a 2 hour wait before embarkation was commenced. Apparently the lines behind us were not pretty. The hot chocolate was good though :) made with milk and nice and warm. That's the Rotterdam through the windows.

Once we were on board we were sure to visit the Java Bar for cappuccino's and some cookies. It was open 8am to 8pm each day, at no cost. We were late leaving Boston due to Stores to be loaded, it was about 4 hours after our scheduled departure before we left Boston Harbour. Fortunately we didn't have a long haul to go to our first port of Bar Harbor, Maine but we did have a bit of a bumpy ride as we were going at speed. Since it was dark when we left, we watched airplanes landing at Logan as we cruised right under the runway path -- it was quite a sight at dinner that night ! Next Page : Halifax