Home Ports: Great Cruise Line Innovation Since Baked Alaska Feature Article Discussion Forum

I just got back from my two week "Clark Griswold" style cross country vacation that included diving about 3000 miles mostly on US I-10. It occurred to me what a great innovation the cruise industry made when they started "homeporting" their ships in various locations through-out the US. That has meant for many cruisers the convenience of taking a cruise with-out much travel to get to the port of departure. U. S. Homeports include Baltimore,Boston, Cape Liberty, New York, Charleston, Gulf Port, Port Canaveral, Miami, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle. As I drove across Mobile Bay on Saturday morning I could see the Carnival Cruise ship arriving in the port there. I thought how nice it would be to live near Mobile and take even a short trip on this ship. A cruise should be a completely stress free vaction experience, but sometimes the travel involved in getting there and back home can make things difficult. The home ports take eliminate this worry for many cruisers who are lucky enough to live near one of these ports.

Unfortunately, the nearest home port to us, in land locked Arizona, is San Diego. When can get there in under 8 hours, maybe 7 hours drive time. We also have the option of a direct 1 hour flight from Tucson to San Diego on Southwest Airlines. This usually means that we …

Bluesky,

I like your thinking.   Maybe when we retire we'll get a second home somewhere near a cruise port.   And San Diego isn't too far away even where we are now.  We only get to cruise once a year right now, so I'm not sure that moving just for that would make sense right now, but hey never say never.  At one point in our lives we thought we might want to move to Alaska, now how crazy is that for being near a cruise port?