Great Cruise if You're Feeling Old and Moving Slowly. Rating should be 2.0 stars, not 3.0

Quebec is a great city. It is beautiful, clean and has plenty of history. Travel early or stay a few days after, depending if this is your embarkation or disembarkation port.

This was a pretty little town but the itineraries offered on the cruise didn't really move us to sign up for anything. We walked around town and did some shopping but that was all.

This port was removed from our itinerary due to a lowered ship speed limit on the Saint Lawrence River to protect the endangered Atlantic Right Whale. The reduced speed did not leave enough time to make this port of call.

This was another beautiful stop and the entire island gave us the desire to fully explore it but time did not allow it. We viewed a handful of lighthouses and came away with a newfound appreciation for the importance of the job that they once performed.

This was a quaint town that did not provide us with much to entice taking tours. Walking the areas close to the ship allowed some shopping but there wasn't a lot to do right in port.

Being the closest rescue port to the site of the Titanic tragedy, this area had a very interesting story to tell after that fateful night. Visiting the Fairview Lawn Cemetery was moving and it was good to follow that up with a visit to the Maritime Museum. The Citadel was also worth the visit, providing a great deal of history regarding the fort built in the mid-18th century to protect the growing city. We chose to take the hop on/hop off bus tour that provided easy transport to all of the city's major interest sites. I recommend this highly.

This city gets such a poor rating, not from the quality of the city but from the worst tour that I have ever been on being offered here. We chose to take the Reversing Rapids Railway Tour in this port. We have previously taken a train tour in Alaska on the White Pass & Yukon railroad that was spectacular. That was a tour from Skagway, not the Alaskan railroad from Whittier to Fairbanks. The scenery can be among the best you will ever see by rail. So we saw this train tour to the famous reversing rapids on the Saint John River and thought it should be something that should be both scenic and very interesting. The bus was 20 minutes late picking us up at the ship but the ride to the depot was only less than 2 miles away from our port. That turned out to be a non-issue because the train wasn't in the depot when we arrived. After another 10 minute delay, the train arrived and we boarded the train. The train traveled no more than half a mile to the bridge over the reversing rapids. It was about 2:00 in the afternoon when we arrived and the tide was midway between low and high tide. Not only were the rapids not flowing spectacularly, the water was nearly still as the flow both upriver and down were equal. What we got to see was basically a lake with water flowing in neither direction. This was the chance of the tides that day, so I don't blame the tour company for the poor luck in the timing. After about 15 minutes over the river, the train continued onward another half mile across the river to a switch track that provided a wonderful view of the wood chip piles of a paper company while the track switch was thrown. After another 10 minutes, the train reversed direction and continued no more than another 2.5 miles to another side track where our buses were waiting to take us on the 10-minute ride directly back to the ship. This "fabulous" experience of fewer than 4 miles of rail travel and fewer than 6 miles by bus was had for the bargain price of only $140 for the two of us. Pondering this, perhaps it was we that were had?

Bar Harbor is one of my favorite places in the eastern United States. The iconic coastline and the mountain views are spectacular, regardless of the season visited, if the harbor isn't socked in by fog. We were fortunate to visit on an equally spectacular fall day with 70-degree temperatures, clear skies, and light winds. Our lobster lunch was just the right touch to finish off our visit to this tourist favorite.

We hit Boston on a Friday and the tour that we were on visited the JFK Library in the afternoon, followed by what was supposed to be a tour of Boston's highlights. In regards to the Kennedy library, that was very impressive. Presenting the account of JFK's life from childhood to his assassination, it was a moving tribute. Kennedy won one of the closest elections in our history. Though he won the electoral college 303-219, he won the popular vote by a mere 118,500+ votes out of 64 million cast. He was loved and hated nearly equally during his presidency. My best friend says that his mother used to literally spit at the TV whenever Kennedy was on, though after his death she drove the family to Washington to visit his body as it lied in state in the capital building. His term was difficult and he is recognized as one of our most popular and successful presidents of all time. Dealing with escalations of the cold war, civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis and organized crime, his less than 3 years in office were difficult at best. Had he not been assassinated, there is no telling how the Vietnam conflict would have gone because he wanted America out of there. It was after his death that Lyndon Johnson jumped us in with both feet and America was involved for a decade longer. Kennedy was also instrumental in getting our space program on track, and as a by-product, much of the framework of today's technologies were financed and developed. Next, we expected to see some of the famous sites so important to our American history yet afterward, I find myself no closer to visiting these sites as at any other time in my life. Though the Kennedy library was worth the efforts, our tour afterward wound up being spent in Friday afternoon rush hour traffic in Boston center. We got to see lots of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, the 19th century Trinity Church (not sure why this was included and it was mostly covered in scaffolding due to repairs, at that) and the finish line to the Boston Marathon. Oh, we did drive past the Boston Tea Party Museum because it was less than a mile from the cruise dock. I think that if there would have been a way to avoid doing so, we would have missed that as well. LOL. If I had wanted to drive around in rush hour and be frustrated at seeing nothing of major interest, I could have done the same thing in downtown Baltimore or Washington DC instead of downtown Boston. I'm still laughing about this portion of the tour.

This was the port of our cruise termination. Since we had a (cancelled) mid-afternoon flight home, we did not think that we had time to tour any of this city.