At the time I'm writing this, the little icons to the right of the screen still say that we're going on a cruise on the Ryndam next year. Real soon now though, it will become the Pacific Aria - it's in Singapore being refitted right now.
The little icons also say that we're doing a cruise on the Emerald Princess next year and as of today that's also old news. Much as the itinerary of that cruise was really interesting, the safety / security levels of some of the places it's going have reduced to the point where I didn't feel totally comfortable any more. I know that cruise lines like Princess won't take you into dangerous places, but that knowledge also caused me issues because this particular cruise isn't one that they have a lot of options with - they need the ship to be in Australia by late 2016 and if there were security or safety issues they'd probably drop more ports from the cruise or even completely reroute it, so we could be left with more sea days than even I can handle.
So, we've changed over to a fairly traditional eastern Mediterranean cruise - 14 days, starting and ending in Rome, on the Royal Princess (one of their newer and larger ships). Princess calls it a "Greece, Turkey & Italy Medley" and apart from those three countries we also go to Malta. After the cruise we'll go to England and spend some more time there before coming home.
Even for this new cruise, people are already discussing issues around security in Turkey, but at present the issues in Turkey are limited to the other side of the country from where we're travelling; we'll be more than 1000 kilometres from any of the (currently) really dangerous areas. This is quite unlike the other cruise which is scheduled to go very close to some areas that are already a bit risky - for example it's sailing right up the Gulf of Aqaba into Jordan, and the Sinai side of the Gulf is already flagged as "Reconsider your need to travel".
So, I'll be starting the planning all over again!
