We have booked the flights and the cruise, so those dates are all confirmed. There's still a week or so where the only plans so far consist of 'somewhere in England, or maybe Wales' but apart from that we have a reasonable idea of where we'll be. So, it currently looks like this:
- 6 September 2016 we fly to Singapore, overnight in a transit hotel - I'm getting too old for this whole "24 hours in economy seats" thing! - and then on to London.
- 2 nights in London to catch our breath and to see a few more things we missed last time
- 9 September we fly to Rome and stay there overnight, including an evening tour of the Colosseum
- 10 September make our way to the port for the Mediterranean cruise.
- 24 September we arrive back in Rome and stay there for a few days
- 27 September we're back in England and the plan is for our first stop to be in Canterbury or thereabouts
- 30 September we're going to Derby for the weekend for Paul's war-game convention, and then all the way to Nottingham for a couple of days :-)
- The rest of the trip is yet to be decided - we want to go to Cardiff, and maybe somewhere in Cornwall.
- 11 October is definite though - that day, we have to be back at Heathrow for the flight home - again with a short rest in a transit hotel in Singapore on the way.
The cruise is actually one of the least definite things at least when it comes to the detail. Normally by now a cruise schedule would be quite definite, and this one appears to be. However, three of the scheduled stops are in Turkey, and some other cruise lines have already cancelled some or all of their stops in Turkey this year. Princess is a fairly conservative cruise line and I'd be surprised if they weren't at least thinking of changing their plans too. That would be really disappointing but I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens - it's hard to imagine they'd cancel the whole cruise but you just can't tell. If they just cancel the calls in Turkey then I suspect that we'll see more Greek islands than we intended to - and I for one wouldn't object to seeing Santorini twice!
Anyway, ignoring the uncertainty around Turkey, the itinerary promises to be somewhat exhausting, even for a cruise - 14 days, only 2 of them are full sea days, and almost all of the ports are places I'm really keen to see.
