Planning: procrastination, paralysis and a paper trail

As soon as we booked this vacation September 1^st rolled around, I threw myself into learning about the French Polynesian European islands ports we’d be visiting.

No, wait. That was a different cruise season. Sure, it would be 100% valid again this year, but I would never, ever repeat myself in this blog (Have I mentioned I want to be home for Christmas?  I know I have, but have I mentioned it lately?). ;-)

For all the wonders of these Mediterranean ports, I had a great deal of difficulty psyching myself up to do an extensive amount of preparation. Frankly, it was the ship more than the itineraries that first had us excited about this season.

There. I've publicly admitted it.

Our first thought was that we simply wanted to do a series of cruises on the Pacific Princess and were going to go wherever our favorite ship went. Of course, we'd prefer it to go to French Polynesia. Heck, if the Pacific Princess returned to French Polynesia every year for the rest of our lives, we'd be there too, riding ATVs up Magic Mountain on Moorea and climbing Mt. Tapioi on Raiatea (Really, I would. Every single year. In fact, several times each year. Heck, I'd run up that mountain!  ''Tis a pity I'm going to miss out on that!). 

And all the Italia-philes are shaking their heads in disappointment right now. I can sense it.  But you know we are beach people.  I am happiest with my head (and hips) underwater. 

So when faced with planning two+ months in the Med, I first procrastinated, putting off the task until summer (after all, I was still getting settled at home after last winter...and shoveling snow!), and then quickly realized that this was going to be no small challenge. On the 77-night Mediterranean and Transatlantic portions alone, we'll visit 29 different ports (!), and have 56 port days.  While some of the ports are repeats for us, many more are virgin territory.  Overwhelmed, I first turned to the same source I've successfully used in the past when I've traveled to Europe on land trips...Rick Steves. 

Thank God for Rick Steves. Sure, he's run me down a couple of questionable paths in the past- taking the train from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and connecting with the subway to get to our hotel in the 3rd arrondissement after a night of no sleep immediately springs to mind, and too many times I've had to put on a show by publicly unwinding my money belt from my underwear when they got tangled together- but when Rick finally accepted that not all who travel to Europe do it by land, he published a wonderful guide to Mediterranean cruising. I immediately checked it out from our local library...

...and became even more overwhelmed.  The book has a whopping 1316 pages. 

I gave myself a pep talk  After all, didn't we venture all around the South Pacific last year? Flights and hotels and more flights and hotels and luggage here, there and everywhere? I could do this!! And so I decided to start at the very beginning, with our first port of the season, and turned to the Venice section in Rick Steves' book. I read the Venice section that June evening. And the next. And the next. In fact, I renewed that book three times over the course of the summer until someone else put it on hold and I couldn't renew it any longer. And on September 1, I was still stuck on Venice. 

Trying again to gain control of the planning process, I changed tactic and instead counted the number of days we'd spend in each port. 

• Venice - 5 (not counting the day we arrive)
• Barcelona - 4
• Dubrovnik, Croatia - 4
• Kotor, Montenegro - 4
• Naples, Italy - 4
• Rhodes, Greece - 3
• Athens - 2
• Catania, Sicily - 2
• Corfu, Greece - 2
• Khios, Greece - 2
• Koper, Slovenia - 2
• Messina, Sicily - 2
• Mykonos, Greece - 2
• Mytilene, Greece - 2
• Rome - 2
• Santorini, Greece - 2
• Bermuda - 1
• Cephalonia, Greece - 1
• Gibralter - 1
• Korčula, Croatia - 1
• Livorno, Italy (for Florence and Pisa) - 1
• Nice, France - 1
• Ponta Delgada, Azores - 1
• Portofino, Italy - 1
• Rijeka, Croatia - 1
• Sarande, Albania - 1
• Split, Croatia - 1
• Valletta, Malta - 1

(Our original itineraries also included five days in Istanbul (including two overnights) and two days in Kusdasi, Turkey, but I knew we were on shaky ground with those from the start.  Our only hope was that Princess would substitute other ports in lieu of sea days when they were cancelled, and, for all seven days, they did.  Go Princess!)

Having the above list helped me to move away from my Venice fixation (five days give us a lot of leeway) and spend my dwindling remaining time reading about the ports we'll visit just once.

Tom's Port Guides (available for free at Tom's Port Guides.com) were also invaluable in our planning. Complete and easy to follow, and accompanied by well annotated maps, Tom Sheridan also includes the amount and difficulty of walking that is required with his tour suggestions, priceless information in towns built on hillsides and paved with cobblestone streets. 

 

Source:  TomsPortGuides.com

He is not a professional travel writer, simply a fellow cruiser who deplores group tours on buses (he is a kindred spirit with G in that regard).  He has done thousands of us a great service by providing such detailed information about what to do in several ports.  I believe he and his wife are going to be on a couple of cruises with us, and hope to meet them.  If I don't the get chance, thank you Tom for all the work you've done!

Source:  TomsPortGuides.com

Hoping that I find motivation and inspiration once my feet touch Italian soil, I've downloaded Tom's Port Guides and the Princess shore excursion booklets into iBooks on my iPad for reference while on the ship. 

Source: Princess.com

I checked out Rick Steve's e-book on Croatia and Slovenia, and a Lonely Planet e-book on Greece from the library using the Overdrive app (still my favorite!).  These books cover a couple of ports Rick doesn't discuss in his Mediterranean Cruise Ports book.  We are so fortunate on the Pacific Princess to be able to get into ports that are too small for the larger ships, and all of those ports are new to us.

I was going to wait to buy the newest edition of Rick Steve's Mediterranean Cruise Ports book when it was published just this week, but when I lost my semi-permanent borrowing privileges of the library's copy in early September, I decided to just purchase the available edition from Amazon.  When it arrived, I immediately set about destroying it.  Rick Steves himself approves, and even showed me how...

...but he made it look much easier than it was!

I started by clipping together the sections of the book I wanted to remove. 

Then I clipped together the few parts that were going to remain. 

While Rick made just four cuts for each section, I found myself sawing at the book until I learned that it was much more easily done once I cut through the spine.

Sadly, the Istanbul and Kusadasi, Turkey sections are staying home. :-(

The remaining book became considerably thinner, and I repaired the spine with duct tape.

 

I was left with twelve separate sections...

...and a mess. I was cleaning up what G called my paper trail off the floor for days. I think the deconstruction would have been easier if I'd used G's heavy duty box cutter, but he doesn't allow me to touch it during the twelve weeks (that's the time required for surgery, recovery and physical therapy) prior to leaving for our cruising season. Seriously. 

I had an old report cover I was no longer using, and repurposed it as a guide book cover by trimming it to the correct size. We'll leave the ship with just the section we need for each day, in a protected cover.  Rick Steves sells a cover for his guide book sections online, but I accomplished the same thing for free.

And, finally, we have downloaded several of Rick Steve's audio walking tours on our oldest iPhone to listen to in port. We are not going to carry our iPhone 6's off the ship due to the risk of pickpockets. Instead I will openly flash our no-longer-sexy iPhone 4, but have a sticky note prominently displayed on it:  "Not worth stealing!" in the language of the day. 

Sufficiently armed with information, we are leaving home with most of our port days wide open. That's the beauty of extended travel, though it took me all summer to realize that we don't have to (and, frankly, can't) plan all of the 56 port days on the Mediterranean and Transatlantic portions of our trip.  In fact, a few weeks ago, seeing my mounting frustration with his unwillingness to commit to specific tours, G adamantly announced that he did not want us to run ourselves ragged for three months and return home stressed and exhausted. Instead he has visions of watching the ship's arrival in port from an upper deck, followed by a leisurely breakfast in the dining room and then strolling off the ship with a guidebook and map in hand to seek out a museum or historical site, followed by a local beverage. After months of spinning my wheels, this was like music to my ears.

We're taking a cruise on a ship that happens to be in Mediterranean waters. We will see things, we will do things. We will relax. 

That's my new mantra. 

Life is good. :-)

Seventh heaven

Welcome back!

It is very hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we are about to embark on our seventh season of extended cruising. Seven years!  I mean, it's not new news that we're seven years older (our bodies remind us of that fact nearly every day); it's more that our 'Five Year Plan' of wintering on cruise ships has been extended not once, but twice. 

I still remember the day G first introduced this 'winters at sea' concept to me. Frankly, I was filled with equal parts horror and intrigue. Horror at the thought of not being home for Christmas (it's nice to know that some things never change), and intrigue because I simply couldn't imagine what it would be like to cruise for more than a month (our previous high). It helped that we eased into it our first year, cruising for 44 nights, flying home for the holidays and then returning to cruise for 30 additional nights. But that was all the acclimation we needed. The next year we jumped in feet first, cruising 100 nights in a row.

And five years after that, we know exactly what it's like to cruise for more than a month. Or four. We know that if we survive the two weeks before and the two weeks after, the trip itself is heaven. Ergo, seventh heaven.

First, though, a bit of catch up...

After we returned home in March, we endured two more months of winter and one month of severe storms that collectively convinced me (and much of the US) that Mother Nature is not our friend. As a result, our major focus this summer became landscaping renewal and repair. At least we were standing on terra firma instead of an extension ladder while we worked, and that was a very welcome change. Throw in some plumbing and electrical work, a bit of car repair and a lot of general nose-to-the grindstone tedium made more tolerable by a quick road trip and a couple of extended stays with the twins and that pretty much sums up how we spent our summer vacation (and you wonder why I don't blog during the summer?!?). 

I also flew back to visit Mom over Mothers Day and hugely enjoyed the relaxing fun and companionship we missed out on last year. Together we played the carefree tourist, visiting museums and (finally!) driving along the river to view the spring blooming trees.  And I loved meeting her fellow residents (I want to be them when I grow up)!  Mom is an inspiration, starting a rosary group and the Walking SenioRitas and instigating the formation of a community choir and pinochle club. She's even being used as a model for marketing brochure photos, and I am nothing short of tickled pink to watch her living the dorm life of a college coed...without the stress of studies. Thank you to all those who have emailed and asked how she is doing. At 85, she is happy and healthy. 

We, too, stayed healthy this summer, although the number of what I consider 'near misses' seems to increase every year. I fondly recall the days when a tummy ache meant simply taking a Pepto Bismal; now it means specialists and prepping for medical procedures meant to view me inside out, only to be told afterwards, "You're fine. Just take a Pepto Bismal".  Could it be that it was all so simple then...

Therefore, it is with a sense of peace and gratitude, for so many things, that we will be embarking the Pacific Princess next Tuesday in Venice.  We'll be staying on for a series of Mediterranean cruises focused primarily on Italy, the Dalmatian Coast and the Greek Isles, and then plan to sail back to Fort Lauderdale on the ship.

 

Venice's Grand Canal at sunset

Source:  https://utrip.com/featured-trip/venice-through-the-lens-of-a-camera/

I mentioned at the close of last year's posts that we were considering four different options for this season (plus a fifth one that never got off the ground). First, of course, was to return to the Caribbean, and we had booked both the Regal Princess and Caribbean Princess, simply to secure the same cabin for our duration of our cruising season. Then Douglas Pearson emailed us that he was going to be the lecturer on the Emerald Princess in Australia and New Zealand, also visiting New Caledonia and Vanuatu, and it seemed the perfect opportunity to complete our Polynesian adventures of the past two years. So we booked that, too, starting in mid-November and ending...sometime (we weren't sure when we'd come home but knew that we couldn't stay as long as the transpacific cruise back to LA next May). And, finally, almost as an afterthought, in April we added the Pacific Princess cruises in the Mediterranean.  

I was also very interested in the HAL Amsterdam 53-night cruise to the South Pacific leaving in late September from Seattle and returning to San Diego. While several of the ports would be repeats for us, we'd get to some new places in Fiji, and to Tonga and Niue and also Fakarava in the Marquesas. G was never on board with what he was certain would be a fairly geriatric passenger demographic and a lot of sea days. But maybe next year...after all, we'll be another year older ourselves. ;-)

We dismissed the Emerald Princess option first, in late May. Of the three alternating itineraries it will be doing (New Zealand, Tasmania and New Caledonia/Vanuatu), we've already done the first two and, as much as we would have loved to see (and hear) Douglas, couldn't justify two very long flights for just a few days on the latter. Besides, just the thought of repeatedly crossing the Tasman Sea (the worst waters we've ever encountered) back and forth to Sydney made me seasick.

We held on to the Caribbean bookings for a long time, as the terror situation in Europe escalated, but, in the end, it was exactly that situation that compelled us to choose the Pacific Princess cruises in the Mediterranean. We are not getting any younger, the flights are not getting any shorter and the world is not getting any safer. The time to go is now. I'll admit it gave me a moment's pause when our financial planner seriously suggested we have our estate planning up to date before we left, but I'm choosing to think of that as just a cheery "Bon Voyage!" in Financialplanner-ese. 

Of course, you know that we wouldn't be us if we left home with all of our plans firmly in place. While we feel fairly certain we'll stay on the Pacific Princess for 77 days, the question of whether we'll continue on the ship for the 14-night Caribbean cruise over the holidays remains. Have I mentioned I want to be home for Christmas?  I know I have, but have I mentioned it lately?

Yep.  Some things never change. ;-)

Not...quite...yet...

I know we've been a bit predictable lately, beginning our cruising season earlier and earlier each year, but we are making an exception this year.  I'm receiving a lot of emails from readers asking WHEN?, and it has been wonderful to hear from you, but I thought a post on September 1 might be in order.

Check back around...(I'm calculating a date in my mind, wondering just how much I'll have to report before we actually leave home)... September 29 or 30, and I'll continue the blog with our seventh winter at sea.  Actually, autumn. Autumn into winter.  Possibly.  But maybe not.  Possibly just autumn...

Better make it the 29th.  Written brevity is not my forte.