I have received two emails, one asking me why I had been doing hand washing on the Royal Princess with our free Elite laundry benefits and the other asking why I would need to do laundry already with all the luggage we had brought. So I'll clear that up right now; despite what it looked like, I actually packed a fairly minimal amount of clothing. For the entire winter, I brought-
- day wear: 4 pair of shorts and 6 T-shirts
- casual evening wear: 4 lightweight sweaters to layer over 2 tanks, 2 tropical shirts and 2 pair of slacks
- formal evening wear: 2 outfits (one of which uses one of the tank tops)
- beach/pool wear: 4 swimsuits (1 is kind of ratty for use in the hot tubs, since the chemicals eat Lycra), 2 coverups and the Caribbean map pareo G bought me last winter to wrap around my center of gravity
- unmentionables: an unmentionable number
- shoes: 4 pair of sandals and a pair of running shoes
That's it. My clothes mostly fit in one half of one big suitcase; the other half holds our hang up clothing including my formal outfits, G's tux and accoutrements, and his tropical shirts. Another entire suitcase holds his clothes (he's much more of a clothes horse than I am). A third suitcase is filled with my shoes and toiletries, meds and vitamins on one side, and G's many more shoes but fewer toiletries on the other. And the fourth suitcase is purely snorkel gear including fins, wetsuit and dive skin, beach floats, beach tarp, cloth cooler/beach bag, dry box, collapsible walking stick, kite, shower wall organizers and over-the-door shoe rack.
For this HAL cruise, since we didn't have to pack liquids in our big suitcases for the transfer from the Royal Princess to the Nieuw Amsterdam, we put all the toiletries we needed for this week, as well as the OTD shoe rack in the beach bag, and packed just enough clothes in our carry ons for 7 days, keeping three of the big suitcases closed. We have the beach suitcase stored opened on the love seat for easy access to snorkel gear.
We sent clothing to be laundered twice while on the Royal Princess, and both times it was returned the evening of the following day (and I happily put my clean cold-weather travel clothes in a 2.5 gallon Ziploc bag and packed them away for the winter). But I learned last year...many clothing items simply can't hold up to four months of commercial laundering. Except for my most sturdy items, I'm either hand washing or personally machine washing most of my laundry. The Nieuw Amsterdam doesn't have passenger laundry rooms, so our travel clothesline is already stretched across the cabin and I'll be washing a few items all week long.
G wore out pair after pair of sandals last winter...he's brought a couple of pair of "extras" for when that inevitably happens this year. Months of salt water exposure is hard on hair, skin and shoes.
So, I have to get back to washing out some unmentionables that I've now publicly mentioned...
- day wear: 4 pair of shorts and 6 T-shirts
- casual evening wear: 4 lightweight sweaters to layer over 2 tanks, 2 tropical shirts and 2 pair of slacks
- formal evening wear: 2 outfits (one of which uses one of the tank tops)
- beach/pool wear: 4 swimsuits (1 is kind of ratty for use in the hot tubs, since the chemicals eat Lycra), 2 coverups and the Caribbean map pareo G bought me last winter to wrap around my center of gravity
- unmentionables: an unmentionable number
- shoes: 4 pair of sandals and a pair of running shoes
That's it. My clothes mostly fit in one half of one big suitcase; the other half holds our hang up clothing including my formal outfits, G's tux and accoutrements, and his tropical shirts. Another entire suitcase holds his clothes (he's much more of a clothes horse than I am). A third suitcase is filled with my shoes and toiletries, meds and vitamins on one side, and G's many more shoes but fewer toiletries on the other. And the fourth suitcase is purely snorkel gear including fins, wetsuit and dive skin, beach floats, beach tarp, cloth cooler/beach bag, dry box, collapsible walking stick, kite, shower wall organizers and over-the-door shoe rack.
For this HAL cruise, since we didn't have to pack liquids in our big suitcases for the transfer from the Royal Princess to the Nieuw Amsterdam, we put all the toiletries we needed for this week, as well as the OTD shoe rack in the beach bag, and packed just enough clothes in our carry ons for 7 days, keeping three of the big suitcases closed. We have the beach suitcase stored opened on the love seat for easy access to snorkel gear.
We sent clothing to be laundered twice while on the Royal Princess, and both times it was returned the evening of the following day (and I happily put my clean cold-weather travel clothes in a 2.5 gallon Ziploc bag and packed them away for the winter). But I learned last year...many clothing items simply can't hold up to four months of commercial laundering. Except for my most sturdy items, I'm either hand washing or personally machine washing most of my laundry. The Nieuw Amsterdam doesn't have passenger laundry rooms, so our travel clothesline is already stretched across the cabin and I'll be washing a few items all week long.
G wore out pair after pair of sandals last winter...he's brought a couple of pair of "extras" for when that inevitably happens this year. Months of salt water exposure is hard on hair, skin and shoes.
So, I have to get back to washing out some unmentionables that I've now publicly mentioned...