The lotto win hasn't happened yet, so sadly the Hawaii to Sydney cruise isn't on the cards :-(
I have booked a (much cheaper) cruise in November this year, but Paul isn't all that keen - he doesn't mind the idea of a cruise but he thinks we should be saving all our money for next year's holiday. He has a good point, but I'm really going to need a holiday by November! Anyway, we've got until early June before we have to reach an agreement - after that we'd lose our deposit.
In the last posting I said that we had booked a Baltic Cruise with Princess - well, yesterday I cancelled it. The main reason we picked that particular cruise was because one of the ports of call was Gdansk in Poland - Paul and I are both quite keen to go there. But, on Thursday night we got an eMail from Princess cruises saying that they had completely revised the itinerary and it's now longer going to Gdansk. That turns it into just another Baltic cruise, and a comparatively expensive one too. So, we cancelled it.
Further research tells me that there are no cruises that stop anywhere in Poland in our available time-frame next year - any attempt by me to take leave in the first 6 months of any year is doomed to failure, and the only ones I can find are in May and June 2014. So, unfortunately Poland goes onto the back-burner for now - there's a vague plan in our minds to do some land travel in Europe in a couple of years time, and we'll make sure to get there then.
In the meantime, we still want to do a Baltic cruise, and I've already got another one booked. We will actually be leaving the same port (Southampton) on the same day (16 August 2014) - but now we're going on the Celebrity Eclipse. We've never sailed with Celebrity before but by all reports they're a bit of a step up quality-wise from any of the cruise lines we've been on so far. This cruise has a very similar itinerary - almost all the Baltic cruises will do some variation on the same basic set of cities - but we will at least get to see Berlin (which wasn't on the Princess itinerary).
Now that's sorted - hopefully! - the next step is to get into research about where we want to go in the UK and what we want to see and do. From our first trip we know there are a few places we want to go back to, and we already have a list of some other places we definitely want to see, but I keep coming across more and more things to do. And unfortunately there's only so much time (and money) we can spend. The current plan is to identify maybe 3 or 4 different cities that are in the general area of things we want to see, and base ourselves in each place for a few days. Some places I expect we'll have to hire a car; in others we can use public transport. What we're definitely not doing this time is going on an organised coach tour; it was a good way to get a big picture look at some of the UK, but this time we want some control over how long we spend in each place - not to mention that we want to be able to stay inside if it's raining!
