Day 1: Flying to San Francisco

I’ll admit, leaving home, as excited as I am about this cruise, is hard for me. It always has been (if you’re a long time reader, you’ve heard me mention my difficulty with transitions before). That’s why when a friend texted me early this morning to wish me safe travels, I jokingly begged her to just let me stay home. Actually, I kinda meant it…for a few minutes.  Fortunately, by the time our driver (our favorite Michelle again) was backing into our driveway, I was raring to go. 

We lucked out today in so many ways. Our weather has been abysmal (for us. Wetter parts of the country might think it quite normal) and we have all been complaining to anyone who would listen about how grey and wet and cold it’s been for at least three weekends in a row, but there was a tiny bit of clearing when we took off, and though we were about 40 minutes delayed and had a pretty rough climb through the clouds, we made up time, the flight was smooth and, most astoundingly, there were 29 empty seats on our plane and we scored an empty middle between us. I’ve been making a lot of short trips recently, and can’t remember the last time that happened. Oh happy day!

G and I have notably different approaches to travel days, with me keeping my head down, avoiding eye contact and screwing Air Pods into my ears and hoping they last the day, while G talks to everyone (!) along the way. Today he approached me with a man I didn’t know; he was the head of Southwest operations at our airport and they had been chatting and he wanted to introduce me. 45 years of air travel and I’ve never met the head of any airline operations while flying. Or at least known that I did, because I’ve never asked.  I think he was just thrilled to talk with people who weren’t unhappy about something. 

Yeah, it’s exactly like that. 😆

We were finishing up spring planting between rain drops yesterday, with G literally making use of a short dry period to mow the wet lawn one last time and me putting down bags of fresh mulch (I’ve left for a cruise without a manicure before, but never with dirt under my nails) so simply sitting for a few hours on our flight was a welcome respite. Once in San Francisco, we claimed our luggage (but our Air Tags told us our bags were right where they should be, always a relief) and followed the signs for Uber/Lyft.  I don’t recall we’ve ever used one of those services at SFO before. It was a $70 trip to the Hotel Zoe Fisherman’s Wharf where we spent the night. 

Our choice of hotel was harder than it needed to be. My research had indicated the Hotel Rui was a good choice (it’s literally right around the corner from the Zoe), and I made a booking, and then G read something more favorable about the Zoe, so I cancelled the Rui and booked the Zoe, and then G read about a happy hour other cruisers were having the night before the cruise at the Rui and asked if we wanted to stay at the Rui after all and…well, his booking agent (me) resisted.  I need to start charging a change fee! We’re at the Zoe but stopped by the Rui. They’re both fine. 

We took a quick rest in our room, charging our phones while we were there and then headed out in search of food and Fisherman’s Wharf. Food was a tuna sandwich from Subway across the street; we were joking about our seafood dinner in San Francisco, but we didn’t have the energy for more than that, and then we set off in search of stinky sea lions. They’re not hard to find, more than a hundred of them in one spot on piers in San Francisco Bay. We were quite taken with the number of Waymo’s, the self-driving taxis on the street. There are far more than there were just two years ago.  We have been seeing videos about the experience, and had hoped to fit in a ride, but I don’t think it’s going to work  pre-cruise. Maybe after…

Cute. Noisy. Smelly. 

Perfect day, but sooo chilly by the water.

Some things never change. 

And that was our day.  It’s nice to have the travel behind us, and know that we have only to get as far as the ship tomorrow morning. And then, 22 days of bliss. 

Life is good. :-)

Catching up

I didn’t even start these current blog posts until I was on the plane to San Francisco, so I’ll do a quick catch up before I get too far into this. 

After my eye debacle the first few weeks of the year, we’ve had a relatively easy 2025 so far. G’s done exactly what he wanted to do (took another transatlantic cruise, this one on the Majestic Princess to Rome), and I did exactly what I wanted to do, which was not cruise, but to instead get to some of McGee’s indoor and outdoor track events. They seemed even more important after he missed the cross country season last fall due to an injury (the only reason I was willing to do the Regal cruises I did). He continues to set class records and is just one second away from the academy record in one event, which, if he makes it next year, will make him the fastest in that event at all of the service academies.

McGuy had a very busy May, getting engaged to his high school sweetheart and graduating with his bachelors degree after just three years. He’s using the fourth year of his scholarship to get his masters degree next year while his fiancé (we’re all still getting used to this 😉) finishes her degree. He’s working a demanding summer internship in town right now, and checking out wedding venues for next summer. I loved his university, his college town and the restaurant scene there, and, if I can talk G into it, would love to spend part of next winter there, exploring the area.

Part of the fun of making these two and three day trips related to my guys is catching up with friends and relatives in the various places the events are taking place. I was in Albuquerque in March and recalled that fellow Cruise Critic poster, CherylandTK lived in the area. I emailed, asking if I could take her out to dinner one night, and she suggested I come to her house and have dinner with her and her husband. It’s fun to meet online friends in person, and I had the most delightful evening with them, enjoying great conversation, a wonderful meal and a beautiful sunset. I returned home ready to move to the desert southwest.

I have been continuing some volunteer work I started during Covid for area senior care facilities (sewing walker bags). My mom had so much support from friends in the community in her final years; it’s nice to be able to pay it back in a small way. My next goal is to get involved volunteering for hospice, but fitting the training in with my travel has been a challenge. 

And, finally, three weeks after we return home from this cruise, I’m going to be having surgery #12 on “that” foot. Sigh. I almost can’t believe it, and was numb when I found out about it a month or so ago. It’s not the most extensive one I’ve had, but it does include some non-weight bearing weeks during recovery, which gets harder every time I do it, and probably six weeks without driving (it had to be my right foot that I crushed back in 1992, didn’t it?!?). I came home from the appointment when I found out about this with G’s favorite BBQ in a carry out bag, trying to ease the news, but he was so mellow about it, saying we’ve done it before and can do it again. G is a saint, especially since our normal post-surgical MO is to set me up in the second floor master bedroom while he delivers food and drink and consolation several times a day. I’m not a fan of summer surgeries, but the timing for this is non-negotiable; I have to be recovered enough to get to McGee’s senior year cross country meets starting in September.  And then, I think, my in-person-school-sports-spectatorship years (16 of them!) may be behind me. It’s been a wonderful era. 

So, lots of good, some bad…it’s life, you know, and we get through it one step (or crutch) at a time. But this summer can’t help but feel a bit like 2019 all over again.  Thankfully, this cruise will prevent it from being a total aestas horribilis.

Whoa, big news just arrived by text (I’m still on the flight to San Francisco). They have a wedding date and venue for next summer!

Life is soooooo good. :-)

I want to go someplace NEW!

Welcome back!  It’s finally here, that exciting “travel to a cruise after a relatively sleepless night because I never sleep well the night before I fly somewhere” day. Considering this was a cruise that we actually cancelled at final payment, we’re both pretty excited to be going, for different reasons. G’s excited to be going on a cruise, period,  and I’m excited to be going someplace NEW (if he had a nickel for every time he’s heard me say that in the past five years!). Nice when it works out well for both of us.

It wasn’t ever that we didn’t want to take this cruise…we booked it quite a while ago (a year?) because we were so intrigued by the itinerary.  We’ve taken ten cruises to Alaska, but never one like this. But as final payment approached, the reality of leaving home for nearly a month in the summer, our favorite time of the year, with the yard and flowers at their peak started to sink in. Then there’s G’s never missed run up Vail Mountain for the Fourth of July weekend. It will be nearly impossible to spend 3+ weeks at sea level and then run 8 miles uphill to over 10,000 feet elevation. Nearly impossible. He still hasn’t entirely ruled it out. I’ll know more if I see him training on this cruise. Time will tell, but, honestly, his fitness is gonna kill me with stress and concern. 

This Alaska itinerary, which seems to only be offered once or twice a year, travels deeper into Alaska, stopping at several ports that don’t show up on the usual itineraries, and also features four days of scenic cruising for glacier viewing.  I’ve said before that I love cruises where we can stay on the ship and the scenery comes to us.  We have plans in a couple of ports, but are mostly going to wing it, based on weather and what we feel like doing on any given day. 

Hope you’ll follow along.  I suspect this might be my last travel for a few months (other, not so fun plans are in place), so we’re going to glean every bit of enjoyment from this cruise that we can. 

I’m still here!

Updated 3/21/25 (see below)

I’m so sorry. I’m also so touched by all y’all’s concern.  I know I stopped blogging with a bang, but there was good reason. As for why it took me so long to get caught up…well, I always say that once I return home, blogging is the furthest thing from my mind. Especially when I’ve been away for almost three months, two months longer than I originally planned to be gone. I mean, I spent a day just cleaning up the dead plants in the house!

As you might have suspected (or maybe not), I once again got COVID on a cruise. Except I didn’t know it was COVID until I went to the Medical Center. Despite leaving home with around 20 test kits (I simply packed everything we had left at home), we used them all by the time I actually got COVID. On our final turnaround day of the season we faced another big move, and I remember being really glad when we were at last settled in our cabin. I was feeling tired, but you might remember, I was fighting that whole ‘open season insurance thing’ and really did lose many nights’ sleep worrying about it, for good reason too, because it was hella screwed up for one of us, despite our written requests being for both of us on the same forms. But I digress.

That first night of that last cruise (Sunday night) I had an awful headache and sore throat. I didn’t leave the cabin that night or all day on Monday, but G brought me some soup from the buffet. As soon as the Medical Center opened on Tuesday, I went there for a strep test, thinking that was what I had. I never even saw the doctor. A nurse first tested me for COVID and it was positive, and then she asked if I wanted to see the doctor but there was really no need. I had brought Paxlovid from home in its lower strength due to my autoimmune diseases.  My PCM won’t let me travel without it (I already have a replacement pack), which is a good thing. The ship’s nurse said they were running low on Paxlovid altogether, but that they never carried the lower dose. She said they had had a lot of COVID the week before, which didn’t surprise me. We had heard a significant increase in coughs around the ship on the previous cruise. 

So I was quarantined until I had no further symptoms (not a set number of days), in our own cabin. G was able to come and go and could dine anywhere on the ship (things have definitely changed in the last few years). I was given a letter spelling out everything, and the Medical Center apparently notified Room Service, because around noon that first day a dining room menu was slid under the cabin door for lunch. And that continued two times a day for the rest of my quarantine. It was simply amazing how well it was handled, which was night and day different from my previous experiences. We let….darn, I can’t remember our last cabin steward’s name…know and he didn’t come into our room until it was all over, but G got fresh towels and dumped our wet ones in his bin. One time a hazmat crew came in and wiped down the walls for about two minutes and, honestly, that was only questionable thing we encountered because that did nothing. 

Twice a day a nurse (not just the Medical Center admin) phoned to check on me and, in the end, I was quarantined until the morning of the last full day of the cruise when all my symptoms were gone. I never ran a fever, the headache was gone after a couple of doses of Paxlovid, so it was really just my sore throat keeping me down. I made it to dinner the last day of the cruise but didn’t go anywhere else.  At that point I was simply over cruising. I just wanted to be home. 

I was given a letter on the final evening documenting the amount of OBC I’d be receiving for missing most of that last cruise. I also received an itemized statement of medical expenses with just two charges on it:  $75 for the nurse and $8 for throat lozenges. There was no charge to receive the bill (honestly, I’ve never been charged for a medical bill on a ship). We flew home the next day both wearing KN95 masks just in case (it was three days before Christmas and ain’t nobody got time for that at Christmas). 

Except, apparently, me. That first evening at home, my eyes felt gunky and I wondered what that was all about. Well, it was about an eye infection but my ophthalmologist’s office wouldn’t allow me to come in for an appointment because I was still testing positive for COVID (I’m STILL testing positive and my doctor said I could for three months or longer). So on Christmas Eve, G was running up to Walgreens before the pharmacy closed at 5pm for eye drops the doctor sent in, and then again on News Years Eve because things weren’t better, and finally, three or four weeks ago, I told the manager at my eye doctor’s office that I was losing my vision and either they let me come in or I was going to the ER that day. Well, they let me come in, and the two prescriptions they had ordered were the wrong thing altogether and my ophthalmologist said he was really glad I pushed for an appointment because things were quite serious and he was saying things like “potential corneal transplants” which scared the bejeebers out of me. 

As a result, I spent weeks not wearing hard contacts and being unable to do much of anything and the worst part was that I couldn’t even see to read or watch TV and I was not a happy camper. But I returned for a check up just this week and things are looking much better (haha), and I feel very adult being able to drive again and do exciting things like go to Costco and work on taxes. 

When I agreed to take the Regal Princess cruises, I told G that if things didn’t go sideways with Princess and if I didn’t get sick, I thought I might be willing to resume cruising like we used to, or maybe at least for a couple of months at a time. Well, things obviously went very sideways with the Regal Princess and we spent more time in Galveston than I ever planned or wanted to, and I got sick not once, but twice. The first time, after the transatlantic, was not a surprise. Long cruises are sick cruises, and though we have no trouble avoiding gastrointestinal illnesses,  I am going to pick up every airborne illness that comes my way. But I really thought I’d be safe on the one week cruises out of Galveston, and I was, until that second last cruise when it was obvious something was going around. People like to say that we can catch COVID anywhere, but I only get sick when I cruise, and I am, sadly, not too anxious to cruise again anytime soon.

I am pretty sure we are going to cancel the 22-night Ruby Princess Alaska cruise we are booked on in June (the timing was never going to be good for us, but the itinerary is amazing). I predict that cruise will have lots of respiratory bugs on it.  Well, we did cancel it before final payment.  And when, two weeks later our original cabin in our favorite location was still available, and I remained fit as a fiddle and ready to travel, AND the price had dropped significantly, we took it as a sign we were meant to be on that cruise.  It is requiring a major re-work of our usual summer plans, but change is good.  Instead of gazing at the mountains of the American West, we’ll be gazing at the mountains of Alaska.  Stay tuned for more blogging.  But we will probably be canceling this one >>>>>> as it interferes with McGee’s last cross country season.  Likewise, the 28-night Sapphire Princess South Pacific cruise in October. But having said that, we could change our minds (though it’s not likely (haha)). I did just book us on a one week cruise in March 2027.  It helps that we have finally reached an agreement with Princess about our expenses related to the time the Regal Princess was out of service in October and November.  It was handled as equitably as we might have hoped.  At the same time, I finally received the OBC for my COVID quarantine.  It gives me hope that, perhaps, Customer Support is returning under Princess’s new management. Which is a good thing.  Because we seem unable to cruise for more than a couple of weeks without running into issues. 

I am instead going to be making short trips related to my guys, the first one being an overnight to Seattle this weekend to watch McGee race, and then a few other indoor track and track-related trips this spring. McGuy graduates in May, and that trip is slightly longer, and we will inevitably do a road trip or two, and possibly a train trip this summer.  But mostly I am going to enjoy being home and being healthy. And hopefully (knock on wood) getting this insurance thing straightened out.

Thank you again for your concern. I could see I was getting emails at my PescadoAmarillo email account, but was unable to read them until this week.  Once I could, I was touched by the number of people who wrote to see if we were okay. We are now, and thank you for asking.  

I wish you all safe and happy and HEALTHY travels, about which you blog or do Live Froms or post on Facebook. Because roles are reversed now, and though I don’t want to, I sure enjoy reading about your travels. Cruise on!

Day 30: Turnaround Day in Galveston

We must be slipping a little. I didn’t have a load of laundry started until 7am, but we did manage to watch sunrise over Galveston (and were thrilled to see that there was a sunrise in Galveston today) before we went to breakfast in the Allegro Dining Room. We kept checking on our new cabin- still occupied- as we finished laundry and started packing up a bit. It was after 8:30 before the prior occupants finally moved out. Our new steward Genghis descended on it immediately and we started hanging up clothes and storing luggage in the closet. Once Genghis was done, we threwg things everywhere and made several trips to retrieve and water bottles and alcohol. Prosecco bottles have dwindled…to six. We share liberally with anyone who happens to be sitting next to us at dinner. There has to be a better idea for minibars for Elites who purchase a package. 

Administration did a fine job tracking us down. Every time one of us entered either our old or new cabin, the phone would ring. We’ve gotten a little jaded, I guess, and know that immigration is usually an hour late. As it was today. We were in the Dumping Dining Room at least 45 minutes before someone from CBP cancer invited to look at our passports. 

G immediately wanted to go outside to see how embarkation was going. We’ve been hearing some bad things cruise after cruise, and so it was again today. Over a thousand people stuck in lines outside the terminal while the waiting rooms were empty. Security screening was the hold up. We heard tonight that some people waited in line three hours to board. 

While he was doing his investigative thing, I started getting th ins in the cabin unpacked and put away. And by that time it was noon, and we met up again in the Allegro Dining Room for lunch. And what an eye opener that turned out to be. Group after group of what looked like college aged passengers came in to dine, and several high schoolers with their parents. The average age in this cruise just went down at least 25 years. And we are sailing over-full with 4100 passengers, over 3000 of which are first time Princess cruisers. We weren’t expecting that until next cruise, but we like it. There is definitely a Carnival vibe on board. 

I spent the afternoon in the cabin making two long phone calls which took up much of the afternoon until we went to the Elite Lounge at 4:30pm and dinner at 5. The dining room was still pretty empty when we left. Something tells me the buffet and outdoor food venues are going to get hammered this cruise.