No more sleeps!

 We have spent the past few days in San Francisco and Sacramento (with our daughter, Kathy, and son-in-law, Ken) just being tourists.

San Francisco was wonderful! The weather was fantastic and all the places we remembered were just as delightful as we remembered: the BV (Buena Vista to those new to San Francisco) for Irish coffee; the Top of the Mark (the Mark Hopkins Hotel) for a martini and the view; the cable cars; the trolleys. The trolleys were especially fun as they really weren’t there—or we don’t remember them—when we lived in the area. Each trolley car is different and began its trolley life in a different city. We rode on one from Philadelphia; one from somewhere in Italy (the signs were all in Italian); one from Denver, I think; and another from yet another city. Fun! Lunch was outside on Maiden Lane at Bistro69; really nice!

The Top of the Mark has a weird idea of what constitutes a martini! Jack and Kahlua is a martini (!). So is “3Gs”: vodka, lemon juice, orange juice, ginger beer, ginger ale, and fresh ginger. How about the “Sunset Martini”: Prairie organic (!) vodka, crème de cassis, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, and a squeeze of lemon juice. What part of “martini” do they not understand? Randy and I are purists, James Bond notwithstanding: Bombay gin, VERY dry—just whisper “vermouth” over the glass—one olive, stirred not shaken as shaking bruises the gin. Or so my father taught me!

We watched the Kentucky Derby from the bar in the Hyatt Regency. We used to bring visitors to the Hyatt just to see the awe on their faces when they came up on the escalator into the HUGE atrium that soars about 20 stories above you. Now it’s commonplace to see such an atrium lobby, but 25 years ago it was an astonishing sight. Boy, am I showing my age!

And we almost rented a GoCar, the same cute little vehicle we are planning on renting in, I think, Barcelona (I have to practice pronouncing it “BARTH-a-lona” since they use Castillian pronunciation). We have one other couple going to do it with us; I hope we can get one or two more. Anyway, it looks like a ton of fun!

Kathy is driving us to the airport for our 2235 departure. We’ll have dinner with her after we drop off our six, yes SIX, pieces of luggage and check in for the flight. I know I could have printed a boarding pass, but since we have to check six bags and we’re going first class, I thought we might as well just do it at the gate.

It’s been a wonderful start to our Grand Adventure. Now, onward and upward to Sydney!

50 days and counting down...

Oh, my gosh, it is getting close! We’re leaving on May 2^nd so that means it’s only—ONLY—seven weeks + one day away. 50 days! Where has the time gone?

I went to look on the Epiphanie website for a girly-looking bag for my camera and my favorite is on backorder until “early May.” Unless I order it in black. Why would I want black? That’s what ALL camera bags look like! Bummer. There are other sites that have feminine camera bags, like Kelly Moore’s 2-sues bag that’s pretty cute! It says it’s out of stock, but Adorama has it in stock in red and grey so I may go that route. She (the designer, Kelly) has a great marketing tool on her website, a video of her and the bag and how to use it. It’s very effective! Of course I haven’t actually bought one yet so it’s not that effective!

I really, really need to look at my clothes and start sorting out what I might be bringing with me. And continue learning how to use the new video camera. And try to get Randy to learn how to use it as well —that may be a losing battle! At least it has a manual. He likes it when things have manuals. He probably wishes I came with a manual!

Another item of clothing I was reminded of by a Cruise Critic friend is shoes. I have a few shoes but I thought about trying to get a pair of high heeled shoes and if I do, I’ll need to break them in a bit. I haven’t worn high heels in years but I know Randy would love it if I would. At least once on the cruise.

Although I won’t be bringing much jewelry with me, what is a formal night without at least some jewelry? Even Randy has some nice cufflinks to bring—assuming I get him that new formal shirt!

Today was the first day in decades that I bought new suitcases. Always before we have used just carryon bags—even for our round the world flight many years ago and our three and a half month Australia trip four years ago and our 60-day cruise a few years back. I’m just getting too old to have to worry and cram and tuck stuff into a carryon! So for the first time in our lives, we now have full sized suitcases!

I still have more readers from Finland than any other country but the US! And I only have 12 unique visitors from Canada but they generate more pageviews than all my American visitors. I love statistics!

Mumbai, here we come!

Booked our first tour so now I feel like we really, really are going on this cruise!

Thanks to a previous cruiser I discovered Mumbai Magic Tours and have booked them for Sunday, June 3, 2012. Gosh that seems a long way away! Through Cruise Critic Roll Call for the Sun Princess World Cruise 2012 (you’ll have to join Cruise Critic to read the messages) I’ve enlisted six other people to join us in the Mumbai Magic Tour. Should be a great tour! I’m working on some others, even further away in both time and distance, in Le Havre for a Honfleur and the beaches of WWII fame. It’s hard to say how much to do how soon.

Princess has updated the schedule for the cruise and we now know we are leaving Sydney on May 16^th from the  Barangaroo Wharf 5, Hickson Rd, Barangaroo, Sydney, Australia. Try to find THAT on a map. I’ll save you the trouble, it’s here but it’s not the wharf by Circular Quay, it’s over by Darling Harbour. On the google map there is a ship docked there with sort of a greenish top. It means we will sail out under the Harbour Bridge. Cross your fingers for good weather for us! But when we come back on August 29^th, we will dock at Circular Quay. Greg has said he would be on the Harbour Bridge as we sailed out so we’re going to get a really big US flag to hang on our balcony for him to see as we sail out.

I’ve lost my flags!

I have a flag counter here and I wanted to make it a bit different. Well, I sure did that! And in the process lost all the count of how many different people from what country had looked at my blog. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the count that gaznjo has: 12,259 from Oz, 2,330 from the US, through 63 from Bahrain, down to 22 from France, but I had quite a few and I’m desolate that the list has vanished. That will teach me to tinker with my blog! 

Although time seems to be moving at a glacial pace, our trip IS getting closer. Everytime I watch the videos from this year’s World Cruise I get alternately energized and depressed. Watching gaznjos blog and vimeo posts I am energized by the wonderful videos of the ports they went to—and, for the most part, we will also be going to next year. I think he does the videos and she picks the music; they each do a fabulous job! At the same time I get depressed because I don’t think I can ever do as well.

But I tell myself that I don’t have to do as well, I’m just doing this blog for my family and friends and they will be very happy (won’t you?) just to see and read about what we’re doing. So I’ll try some videos to add a bit of interest to my blog.

However, taking videos of Kathy’s horse show made me realize just how difficult it is to do GOOD videos! Anybody can point a camera at a thing and take a picture of it; not just anybody can make that picture or video into an interesting one. If it were easy all of us would be making movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all the time. I mention that movie because we will be going to the area where at least part of it was filmed, Petra in Jordan. Naturally, we’re going to have to watch it again!

I’m going to google the ports we’re going to and see what movies—if any—were filmed at those ports. For example, Athens was the setting for, among others, For the Love of Benji and The Day the Fish Came Out (I never heard of that one either) and several dozen others filmed in Greece, mostly in Santorini rather than Athens, but how far wrong can I go watching a movie set in Greece? For movies shot in Mykonos, I hit a double: The Kings of Mykonos, an Australian movie shot in Mykonos. Really it’s a hat trick as it’s a comedy, too.

OK, I really HAVE to get cracking on some tours. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s still—let me look at the cute little counter on my blog—179 (5 months and 3 weeks) days until the cruise leaves. But it’s only 2 weeks until our second payment is due. Ouch. Then there is the third payment due about 6 weeks after that. Then we’ll REALLY know we’re going!

Anyway, I’ve put a request on the Cruise Critic Roll Call for the Sun Princess about a tour of Mumbai by a company (used by others on Cruise Critic) called Mumbai Magic. I wish I had discovered Cruise Critic long ago, before our first cruise! They have everything you could possibly want to know about cruising. And I expect we’ll have a much better time on our cruise because of the connections I’ve made on the Roll Call.

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.

And so the checklists begin!

I have been obsessing about our cruise and am starting on a checklist. This is a compilation of many checklists suggested by several people on Cruise Critic. I know this will change, be added to, subtracted from ad nauseum!

Please add any thoughts you have to my current ideas!

Notes for our cruise

Important thought #1: IF YOU DON'T USE IT AT HOME ON ANY AVERAGE WEEK OF YOUR LIFE - DON'T BRING IT!

Important thought #2:Ten Essentials for Traveling Well:
•    Smiles
•    An open mind
•    Tolerance
•    Laughter
•    Flexibility
•    Mindfulness
•    Curiosity
•    Manners
•    Gratitude
•    Serendipity

Now the less important stuff:

CLOTHING, ETC.
•    Clothing and Shoes – formal, casual, gym
•    Lightweight rain ponchos
•    Sweater and/ or jacket
•    Umbrella
•    Poncho
•    Visor/hat

TOILETRIES
•    ShampooDisinfectant wipes
•    Purell or other waterless hand cleaner
•    Fabreeze air freshener
•    A small shower organizer to keep the soap and shampoo, razor, etc

PERSONAL ITEMS
•    Stain remover pen
•    Glasses – sunglasses, reading, and prescription
•    Extra pair of prescription glasses
•    Eyeglass repair kit
•    Bottle/can opener
•    Sewing kit
•    Cheap waterproof watch
•    Downy wrinkle release spray
•    Tool kit
•    Camelback

DRUGS, MEDICINES, ETC.
Medications
•    Prescriptions with doctor's letter + non-prescription
•    Prescription medications (4 month supply +)
•    Broad spectrum antibiotics
•    Diarrhoea (Pepto Bismol tablets, etc)
•    Vomiting
•    Cold and flu
•    Pain killers (aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, etc.)
•    Anti-histamines
•    Bonine or Dramamine
•    Anti-inflammatories
•    Benedryl
Ointments
•    Neosporin
•    Calamine lotion
•    Antiseptic ointment
•    Sunscreen
•    Lip balm
•    Sunburn cream
Miscellaneous
•    Moleskin
•    Band Aids
•    Insect repellent
•    Dental floss
•    First aid kit
•    Tweezers
•    Nail clippers
•    Emery board
•    Clear nail polish (nylon runs)
•    Rubber bands

ELECTRONIC ITEMS
USB copy of all paperwork – leave a spare USB with all details with Kathy
•    Itinerary
•    Airline tickets
•    Cruise tickets
•    Passports
•    Visas
•    Visa waivers
•    Insurance documents (health and travel)
•    Bookings for independent tours
•    Confirmations for rental cars
•    Labels pre-addressed for postcards to be sent
•    Copies of passport, credit card & important numbers incase you lose it
Wallet cards –
•    Credit and debit cards
•    Health fund
•    Medicare
•    Senior cards
Other
•    Kindle loaded with books
•    Binoculars
•    Waterproof bag for camera, money, etc when at the beach
•    Power strip
•    Extension cord
•    Walkie Talkies
•    Think about Skype while on the cruise
•    Mobile iphone with world clock and alarm clock, and walking tour apps loaded, phone card or International travel sim
•    GPS on cruise
•    iPod and charger
Camera –
•    Disposable underwater camera
•    Rechargable batteries for your digital camera
•    Battery charger (s)
•    Cell phone charger
•    Extra memory cards for your digital camera
Laptop computer
•    External hard drive to download photos and for email
•    Charger
•    Mouse

MISCELLANEOUS
•    Souvenirs from Tucson (postcards, key chains, pens,
•    Neck lanyard (2) for key card
•    International calling cards on sale for gifts to stewards
•    Glowsticks at dollar store
•    Guidebooks for your cruise desitnations
•    Swiss Army knife
•    Shamwow
•    Bring  my saguaro glasses? Where are they?

FOR THE ROOM
•    Chair Clips
•    Suction hooks (for balcony door), magnets
•    Clothes line and pegs
•    Banner and/or flag?
•    Luggage labels and boarding passes
•    Flashlight and spare AA/AAA (other?) batteries
•    Highlighter
•    Pens
•    Post it notes
•    Blu tack
•    Duct tape
•    World map with magnets to put up on wall
•    Other maps and guide books for ports of call
•    Large metal paper clips for hanging up wet bathing suits
•    Single $$ for tips and misc. Spending
•    Addresses of all those that you want to write postcards and letters to while on your cruise.
•    Ziplock bags (asst sizes)
•    A small pair of scissors
•    A bungie cord to hold open the sliding door to the balcony and/or hold the drapes open
•    Thermal coffee mug? Buy on board? Accordian file?
•    Thank you cards to leave for waiters and stewards. (They really appreciate them!) IDEAS
•    Ask for egg crate bed topping (very few usually available)
•    Don’t pack tshirts, you’ll buy them
•    I took the dollar bills, the candy bar and did a little Print Shop magic and created a label (shipping label size...6 t a page) thank you with a ship and my DH's name and my name too. (the quote says, "thank you for helping to make our cruise a memorable experience") Put all of this in a cello bag and stapled them shut. I made 18 of them.
•    Small knapsack for Randy to carry (otherwise it goes in my purse!)
•    Business cards with my email address for the new friends I will meet on the cruise
•    Indoor/outdoor thermometer?

LOOK UP
•    Anzac Cove and Gallipoli

FOR OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES
•    A backpack or fanny pack (my Australian dil says not to say “fanny pack” but “bum bag”) for carrying things on shore excursions
Take with you on excursions
•    Your passports
•    Ship Cards
•    Credit Card
•    Cash
•    Tour Vouchers & Payment for Tours with tips
•    Waterproof Camera
•    Rain Ponchos
•    Thermal Bag with drinks & ice Bug spray
•    Sunscreen
•    Waterproof (water resistant) shoes
•    Sunglasses

TRIP IDEAS
•    Backpack for tours / Gifts (I take small clip on koalas/Aussie keychains  to give to children and guides we meet in ports)
•    Different nights on board, like Country/Western; White Night: plan clothes accordingly
•    Funny hats?
•    Weekly statement of onboard account
•    Many recommendations to do tours on our own
•    Kim’s, Bannisters, what else?
•    Walk in Rome, no tour
•    Auckland: penguin encounter at Kelly Tarlton’s www.kellytarlton.co.nz, there is a free shuttle bus to the site which leaves from across the road from the ferry terminal ... only a five to ten minute walk from the ship - it leaves every hour - on the hour and returns at 10 minutes to each hour. The entrance cost is $34NZ for adults, cheaper for over 65’s, with 10% discount if you book online beforehand. There is also a free shuttle which takes you round downtown Auckland.
•    Tahiti: Take the ferry to Moorea in the morning and do the Tahiti tour in the afternoon. The other way around often doesn’t work because of time constraints with the ship’s departure.

SHOPPING
•    Empty tote bag for carrying what you buy on shopping trips

Still months and months away

But planning is more than half the fun!

I should put in some of the details here: We are departing Sydney (SYD) on 16 May 2012 on the Sun Princess but we will leave the US before that First Class (!) on United Airlines to SYD.

Among other things, our 50th anniversary is right before we get on the ship so I want to find something to do on the 12, 13, 14 of May. Something spectacular and really romantic. Not to mention wanting to give Randy something to commemorate our spending 50 years together! Guys are NOT easy to buy for, however, so I will have to think about this for the next few months.

I also have to think about getting our reservations back home from SYD!

It may even be time to start some of our checklists. The one thing I'm sort of worried about is visas. We need visas for many, many countries. So I have to look into how to do that in a timely manner.