Seward / Princess vs Carnival

Sitting in a hotel in Seward Alaska after getting off the Coral Princess in Whittier this AM. My connections have been spotty, and so has my writing, so a little background. We left Vancouver on Monday, July 31 at 4 in the afternoon. I will try to post up some pictures at some point, but of course they do very little justice to most elements of a trip like this.
The
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifCoral Princess
is 954+ feet long with 13 decks, and a capacity of a bit less than 2K passengers and 900 crew. Over 90% of the cabins have balconies, and having now cruised with a balcony, it would be hard to go back to a window. Princess is supposed to be a cut above Carnival where our previous two cruises were taken and I’d agree with that statement. It is almost exactly the same kind of comparison as “WalMart vs Target” in the department stores, although I’d argue Carnival is at the “Target level” and Princess is maybe like a Nordstrom’s or Bloomingdales. Cabins are a little bigger, ship is a little newer and nicer finished, service is a bit better, food is a bit better … it is all just a “cut above”, but of course you pay for it.

Is it worth it? Well, I shop at Wal-Mart vs Target, but I’m more inclined to think so in this case. I shop every week but I don’t cruise every week (boo hoo). Vacations don’t come around all that often, so it seems to me that a bit more investment is warranted since you are likely to have those memories for the rest of your life. The weekly milk, cereal, and other sundries will not be long in memory.

That trade-off between “stuff” and “memories” came to my mind a few times on this trip. In my younger years, my thinking tended to point toward the “stuff”, maybe partially because I didn’t have that much of it. As the years have gone by and the stuff as piled up, the value of the memories seems much enhanced. Can we “take those with us” forever? Seems worth hoping at least for at least the good ones, and as long as we have anything in this world (our minds), they are always with us here. As Don Henley says on the stuff; “You don’t see any hearses with luggage racks”.