Interested to hear experiences from people who took cruises from NYC to Canada, and NYC to Carribean. I'm in the early stages of planning a family cruise for next July.

You'll get lots more info on cruisecritic.com. The boards there are strictly for cruises, and very informative.

Your itinerary looks fine. There is one suggestion. If visiting Hoover DAm you would have less driving to do if you visit the South Rim instead of the North Rim. You can read cruise reviews at www.cruise-addicts.com

My previous message, somehow, became garbled. The only relevant part is the cruise-addict site for reading reviews. The usual destinations for July cruises, out of NYC, are Canada, New England and Bermuda.

We took a cruise to Halifax, Nova Scotia out of NYC two years ago. We went on the Carnival Destiny. All in all, we had a good time. The weather, however, was terrible. We went in the middle of July, hoping we would have good weather, but, unfortunately, it was cold, rainy and foggy for five days. We didn't sit on deck until the last day and even then we had jackets on. Of course, we were in the North Atlantic so I guess it is not unusual. The cruise was fun. We enjoyed Halifax and visited Peggy's Cove. We also stopped in St. John, New Brunswick, which wasn't much. Our cabin on the Destiny was more than adequate. We had a balcony, which would have been great had we been able to actually sit on it!!

It would take almost a week to get from NYC to the carribean on a cruise ship so there probably aren't many round trip cruises with that itinerary.