Less than 200 days to go!

It’s hard to believe that we will be on our great adventure in just over six months! I am calling it our great adventure, but really it’s not the first we’ve had. 

Our first great adventure, in 2002, was a cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to San Francisco followed by driving our RV to Alaska for two months. We put 17,000 miles on the motorhome plus 7,000 miles on the Trailblazer SUV we pulled behind the RV. That was my first experience in trying to keep an online journal. In those days that meant writing it on my computer and trying to find a modem connection to email the journal to our children and a few friends. Many times that meant cajoling the RV Park owners into letting me use their only phone line. I had to promise not to take more than a few minutes, so I sent very few pictures!

Our second great adventure was actually two back-to-back cruises in 2006 on the Holland America Prinsendam from Ft. Lauderdale to South America and back and from Ft. Lauderdale to Amsterdam (60 days total) followed by an RV trip to Canada. At the time, that seemed like a really long cruise—but we haven’t yet found a cruise that was too long. We were the only two who went back-to-back so we had a really great time time with the staff on the second half of that cruise. They seemed to enjoy knowing at least two passengers and we enjoyed being the “old hands.” I had better luck at sending my deathless prose, but still couldn’t send many photos as it took too many of the precious “internet minutes” we had paid dearly for.

Our third great adventure, in 2008, was an almost three-month trip around Australia. Well, it was mostly Western Australia as we had already spent a lot of time in the eastern half of the country. One trip was for almost 2 months (in 1997) of flying to many of the biggest cities—Hobart, Adelaide, Melbourne, Alice, and Darwin and then using a campervan as our home base. Several other trips were for a couple of weeks at a time. Can you tell we love Australia? Too bad it takes so darn long to get there! By this trip I had sort-of mastered the ability to upload my electronic journal. If you’re interested it’s on another page on my blog (http://worldcruise12.blogspot.com/ or http://pamryan.blogspot.com).

So I guess this cruise will be GA4. We are SO looking forward to it and to the approximately 27 of the 41 ports we’ve never been to! Half the fun is figuring out what we want to do in each port.