Cruise Critic

 Almost a year ago, many of us on the cruise started "talking"about various aspects of the cruise on cruisecritic.com This is a forum in which you find your ship, the date of your cruise and can "chat" with others that will be on the ship about arranging private tours, sharing a ride from the airport to the hotel or ship, discussing what clothes to take.  Since this was a Trans-Atlantic cruise, we also arranged activities.  Marvin had to seminars on Kindles giving us each books to upload.  We also arranged for the slot pull, our Qsine dinner partners and these photos are of the Poker/Cabin Crawl.
 
We were given a map and assigned a group. We had one surprise on the crawl---one of the cruise critic people had a penthouse suite (1900 sq. ft.) with a grand piano, dining room for 8 and a hot tub on the balcony.

Another component was the poker crawl.  In most of the rooms, we drew a card, the host initialed it and marked in on our paper (we each paid $5).  Because each room had its own deck of cards I had two Jacks of diamonds and 2 Kings of diamonds---I was forced to re-draw, though so didn't win the poker crawl.

Other activities were Cruise Critic get-togethers with coffee, cookies.  But there was also a wine-tasting (each person brought a bottle of wine to share) and a gift exchange.  Each person brought a gift from their country or part of the country for about $15.  I didn't participate in that or the wine-tasting, but I went to observe.
 The best was pre-arranging our dinner companions each night.

Rhoda and Gary from Florida just asked on Cruise critic if anyone with early seating wanted to dine with them.

Trish and Pat (California), Dave and I stepped forward.  We had a great time and enjoyed their company more than most tables consisting of people we didn't know before the cruise.   I highly recommend cruisecritic.com.  One person had a web site with all sorts of information and another had put together a photo gallery ahead of time.  Although cruisecritic.com is  a little difficult to manage sometimes, the information, activities and friendships are well-worth it.