Princess had already decided that it wouldn't be safe to go to Istanbul, but we were still scheduled to have two other stops in Turkey - both at Kusadasi. However today they emailed to say that we are definitely not going there either.
The new itinerary includes two stops at Corfu (Greece) and two at Kotor (in Montenegro), and there's a further disappointment that we now won't be going to Malta. I just compared our latest itinerary with the original one, and 7 out of the 14 days we're going to be somewhere other than the original plan.
As I said before, it's disappointing because the cruise we'll be going on now is not a cruise I'd have chosen, but it's how these things happen. And it's still a cruise!
I'm sure we're going to see some lovely places - this is the itinerary as it stands today:
Less than two weeks now until we leave Australia and I have caught the most miserable cold. I had the day off sick on Monday, thought I was getting better so I went to work yesterday and today, but by the end of today I could barely function. Hopefully it's all over by the time we have to leave!
Anyway, tonight I cheered myself up by looking at more possibilities around a retirement cruise to celebrate my escape from work. I can't see myself staying at work once I've turned 60, and to be honest today when I drove out of work I realised that I wouldn't care if I never went back. This isn't a common feeling for me; the infuriating rules and procedures and the never ending insults from senior management about the useless system we have built (not true by the way) are usually still offset by the fact that the work is interesting, the people I deal with in my day to day work are almost without exception really good to work with, and I feel that I am making a contribution to society. Not today though. And unfortunately, 60 is still more than 2 years away :-(
Hence, the hunt for a retirement cruise to cheer me up. This year's cruise was never going to take us to places in the Western Mediterranean, and now of course we're missing some of the really interesting ports in the East as well. So, I thought that this would be good:
It's 28 days, starting and finishing in Barcelona and going to all sorts of interesting places including more than one bucket list item - for example Paul wants to see Gibraltar and I want to see the Duomo in Florence. I doubt that we'd get to next year's version of this cruise, but maybe in 2018.
Or, knowing me, maybe I'll come up with some completely different plan like this:
or this:
or even this 85 day monster cruise (if I could only win more than $13.70 in the lotto!)
