Well, we won't be going on any of the four cruises that appeared at the top of this page when I logged in this morning, so they've all been removed 😞.
The cruise line cancelled three of them. The fourth one - a "Search for the Northern Lights" cruise from Southampton to the far north of Norway in October 2021 - is still theoretically happening but I cancelled our booking yesterday for a couple of different reasons.
- I don't need any sort of government mandate to tell me this - there's no way I'm leaving the country before I'm vaccinated against COVID-19. They're saying that vaccinations won't even start here until March 2021, and I've got no way of knowing when our names will get to the top of that list.
- I'm also not going anywhere that I'm likely to run across lots of non-vaccinated people either, and although some countries have started the process there's no clear idea when they're going to be done. And that's leaving aside the depressing fact that in general "cruise ship" equals "lots of citizens of the USA" and the external persona of the USA is still more anti-vaccination than most other countries.
- And just as important - Australia is one of the most multicultural countries in the world. By the time it's both permitted and safe to leave Australia, there will be more than a year's backlog of people desperate to travel to visit family and friends overseas. Not only are their needs greater than mine, but I suspect that their needs (and the needs of airlines around the world not to go bankrupt) are going to push air-fares out of Australia outrageously high for most of next year.
This doesn't mean that I've given up on cruising or overseas travel - those four cruises have already been replaced with four different ones. Although of course it's a depressingly long wait until the next one, and we have no plans to leave the Australia-NZ bubble until the middle of 2022.
High points of the "new" upcoming cruises:
- For the two day cruise from Brisbane to Sydney - I just booked this one because I was trying to use up some Future Cruise Credits from cancellations of earlier cruises, including one that expires tomorrow. And of course starting in Brisbane means we can visit the family before-hand. We've really splurged on this one - we're in a Penthouse Suite! This will end our longest break between cruises since the break between our first ever cruise in August 2002 and our second one in December 2008 - since then we've never gone more than 15 months between cruises.
- The cruise from Melbourne to Adelaide was going to be our return to cruising until I booked the earlier Brisbane-Sydney one. The cruise line had a special deal going so we went for a slightly bigger cabin than usual - but nothing as fancy as a Penthouse Suite. The ports we're visiting are mostly the same as Adam and I saw on our cruise in January this year - Port Lincoln, Kangaroo Island, Adelaide.
- The good thing about the New Zealand cruise is that Princess has gone back to doing some cruises that start and end in Auckland rather than just return trips from Sydney. This means that we'll be able to spend some time in NZ after the cruise - there are a few places on my "must see list" in NZ that you really can't sensibly see on an excursion from a cruise ship. If we manage to get there this will be our first time out of Australia in more than two years.
- The Dubai-Dover cruise is a leg of a world cruise, which means that the vast majority of the people on the cruise will be older, richer, and far more "cruised" than we are! High points of this one are some places we haven't been to before, including Croatia, Venice (if they haven't completely banned cruise ships by then, which they really should), Malta (at last, after three separate failed attempts to get there on earlier trips) and Cobh. And some places we've visited before and are more than happy to see again including Petra, Santorini, Rome, Barcelona and Gibraltar.
My big worry about the last cruise is actually Dover. Last time we went there, Dover made it pretty clear that we aren't friends - I fell and it later turned out I had broken my elbow which didn't ever heal properly, we both got stung by nettles, and the seagulls covered our hire car in bird poop. I suppose things can only improve 😃
And, apart from those cruises, Paul and Adam have a fairly large cruise credit from P&O as a result of the cancellation of Amanda's birthday cruise back in April and we all have a small credit from the cancellation of Julie's birthday cruise. At some time we'll have to use up that credit, particularly Paul's and Adam's which aren't the sorts of amounts you'd want to write off as a loss. So, being me, I've left a space in the cruise schedule for going on a "Bounty Adventure" cruise in October 2021 - unless of course someone decides to have another attempt at a birthday cruise instead!
