Traveling and the space/time continuum…

A wonderful place to find cruise reviews in general as well as lots of location information for cruisers (and others) is Ralph Grizzle’s Avid Cruiser. There is also his sister site for river cruisers. Just the place to get all excited about whatever our next cruise might be! We are mildly interested in a 180 day (yes, half a year) “World Cruise” on Oceania departing the US in July. It doesn’t exactly go around the world but it does hit some very interesting ports.

One of my problems for the upcoming trip is the number of devices we have that need to be charged! I made a list and it may not (but I hope it is!) even be complete but it’s all I can think of right now:

·         my camera

·         Randy’s camera

·         computer

·         cell phone

·         my Kindle

·         Randy’s Kindle

 That’s six total, three plug-ins, and three USBs. We’ll be fine on Holland America as we’ll have a lot of American outlets in our suite but the river cruise and our time in England and Istanbul are different.

We should be fine with Type F (or C) for the River Princess and for Istanbul but Great Britain (or England or United Kingdom—only country I know that has three names and you never know which name is going to be used!) we need a Type G. Have your eyes glazed over yet? Just in case you didn’t know, we in the US use Type B or Type A. Magellans has this fairly small dual voltage power strip (including a USB port) but it won’t be available until March 14^th. I may have to settle for that because all the others I’ve found are too big.

Because we are travelling for about two months (well, 69 days, but who has the time to count?), there are several (lots?) of things to think about relative to being gone for that amount of time (hence the space/time continuum reference).

Prescriptions: will we have enough (not a huge problem as we get 90 days at a time and luckily we each only take a couple).

Reading material: our Kindles have simplified this tremendously! But we’re still stockpiling “books” from the free sites BookBub and Pixel of Ink (since the definition of book is “a set of printed sheets of paper that are held together inside a cover,” are they still called that if they are on a Kindle? What ARE they called?). Well, we do occasionally actually PAY for a book. Like a recent Faye Kellerman book I hadn’t read.

Photo storage: Since I take several hundred photos every day in raw format (for my Nikon, that NEF), I need a LOT of storage. And Randy takes a few (?) also. Luckily I have a 1terrabyte hard drive so we should have plenty of room!

Luggage: Because we’re traveling first class, we can take two checked bags each. Except on the flight from Istanbul to Bucharest, so we’ll have to limit ourselves to one checked bag and a carry-on. Since we once went around the world using one carry-on each, we OUGHT to be able to live with a checked bag AND a carry-on.