25th wedding anniversary

Last week, Paul pointed out to me that next year is our 25th wedding anniversary.
Anyone who knows us won't be at all surprised that we then immediately thought that a cruise would be a really nice way to celebrate - Paul's suggestion actually but I wasn't going to argue  :-)
Of course, there's only the minor issues of paying for it, and also of getting leave from work when we'll only have been back for three months after this year's long holiday!  However, our employer is actually quite insistent that everyone should take at least two weeks  of their annual leave every year, and clearly that's a fine plan as far as we're concerned  :-)
So, it turns out there aren't actually a lot of cruises in February.  The vast majority of the cruises that time of year seem to be in the Mediterranean or Caribbean - since it's the northern winter they seem to be avoiding the colder places.   But we're going to do two separate Caribbean cruises this year, and the Mediterranean is a big part of our 2015 cruise.  There are a couple of interesting South American ones that are already sold out! and there are a few others but nothing that we can afford and that really appeals, specially given the cost of airfares and the amount of extra time it adds just flying there.....
So, if we do this, it will probably be somewhere close - these ones would all have us on board on our anniversary:
10 Night South Pacific Cruise
11 Night South Pacific Cruise
14 Night New Zealand Cruise
All three cruises are with Royal Caribbean, all leave from and return to Sydney so airfares aren't a problem.  We have been to almost all of the places on all three cruises, but in some ways that's not necessarily a bad thing - we know a little about each place now and have an idea about what to do, what we missed first time around, and what to avoid.
Definitely more thinking to be done here!

Holiday plans are slowly getting there

Happy 2012 everyone!
Now that it's this year, the next holiday is feeling like it's a bit more real, and I've finally done the last major booking - the flight home from Los Angeles.
Even though it means a stopover in Auckland, we're going to come home with Air New Zealand. For the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland we've booked a Skycouch - basically the two of us get three seats for only $600 more than the price of two, and these seats are set up so they can be a sort of a bed.  It's not long enough to stretch out on, but it's a guarantee of enough room for just a bit of comfort.  By this time we're going to be really tired and this is the best we can do short of selling the house to fly business class!
So, the final count of countries we'll set foot in is fifteen.  United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and New Zealand are only transit stopovers, but if it's good enough for the Century Club to count airport stopovers, I'm going to count them too  :-)
232 days until we leave!