Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Officially excited, 74 days to go...



OK, I am officially excited about our cruises because Uniworld has just issued the Cruise Companion and Excursion Planner for the Grand European River Voyage! If you just can’t contain your curiosity, it’s here. And Holland America has its brochure out here for their 27-day Azores, Spain & Mediterranean Expedition. 74 days from now we will be on a plane bound for Fort Lauderdale!

Even though our kids are with us on the whole trip, it’s really nice to plan stuff with them. Well, mostly with Kathy as she’s the one who seems to share my love of planning, planning, and woo-hoo! PLANNING! I really do think that planning is almost more fun than the trip. First of all, planning takes a LOT of time and the trip itself will be over in a green flash. Our ‘round the world trip was ostensibly 104 days + and it seemed that we had hardly gotten on the ship and we were getting off. Not that I am complaining!

It’s going to be fun over the next few days looking at the (included) shore excursions for the river cruise and comparing Holland America’s excursions with the ones we’ve planned ourselves.

One of the things I was thinking about for our world cruise was (is) a new photo bag. There are lots available that are designed specifically for women and maybe, just maybe, I will get one. One I’m interested in is this one
Mustard LyricLyric
From www.epiphaniebags.com . But Mustard is out of stock. 

This is nice, too, but rather large
Turquoise Madison Teal MadisonMadison
And none of the available colors floats my boat anyway. I mean, really, TURQUOISE? TEAL?

The ones I like seem to be the ones that are out of stock, like this
Caramel SydneySydney
in Caramel. But Kiwi is in stock as is Turquoise. No wonder! Who wants to carry a lime green or turquoise camera bag?

Then there’s Kelly|Moore
2 Sues2 Sues (yes, that’s really the name)

But there’s lots more, so I’ll keep looking!

Friday, January 17, 2014

Never point with just one finger…



I’ve been doing battle with a new computer that has Windows 8.1. Need I say more? I’ve happily been using Windows 7 for about three or four years and I really understand it. Windows 8 is a whole 'nother ball game! And I don’t know the rules.

So, to get my mind off the problems of trying to figure out how to restart the computer—which I have to do regularly since I’m installing all my favorite programs—and how to find the programs I’ve just installed, I’ve been getting back to planning our spring trip.

I’ve been away from the planning end of the trip for several weeks (I know I promised to start writing this blog more regularly but life has gotten in the way!) but my daughter asked for our checklists and that got me thinking again about the cruises and the flights and the hotels and the tours and and and… I found a few neat websites. How about this http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/50-things-a-traveller-should-know/. There are some interesting items on this list like knowing the names of at least four German sausages (Bratwurst  [minced pork and beef], Blutwurst [blood sausage]—blecchh!, Bockwurst [veal with some pork], and Weisswurst [white sausage made with veal and bacon]) and knowing how to express ‘No’ in Turkey (you don’t shake your head, instead, you raise your eyebrows and tilt your head up).

For yet more information you never knew you wanted to know, there are these sites, from the mundane http://stuff4kids.hubpages.com/hub/Ten-Fun-Facts-About-Toilet-Paper to the extremely useful http://www.omniglot.com/language/ and http://www.traveletiquette.co.uk/

About those checklists. As our children know, we not only have checklists, we have checklists of our checklists. We have cruising checklists (including warm weather cruising and cold weather cruising), we have timeshare checklists, motorhome checklists, and travel-by-car checklists. Nevertheless, we persist in going places and forgetting the most basic items. Last week we went to Phoenix for Randy’s birthday and forgot toothbrushes, toothpaste, and combs. We went to Seattle last year for a zoo trip and I forgot my camera! What is finally penetrating is that if you have checklists to make sure you don’t forget anything, you have to actually LOOK at the checklists.