101 days to go... random ramblings

• Had a bit of a scare yesterday morning when someone pointed out that our Panama Canal cruise had vanished off the Princess website!  The cruise lines do sometimes have to drop a cruise - or sometimes they get an offer they can't refuse from someone who wants to charter the whole ship.  And, it's not unheard of for people to first find out that this sort of thing has happened when their cruise disappears from the website.  Eek.  Good news though, it must have been just a little glitch because it's back again  :-)

• I'm still slowly working my way through the to-do list for the holiday.  It still seems just a little too far away to be real, but if the next 101 days fly by as quickly as the last 101, then I'll be sitting here typing that we're about to leave home in no time at all!

• I'm waiting for Royal Caribbean to open up bookings for the short excursions on our Caribbean cruise.  The other day I was having a general look at what's available, and I got to our stop on an island called St Maarten.  The island is actually part of two separate countries - the port where we stop part of the Netherlands, but the other side of the island is French.  Quite a few of the excursions - including one I was looking at - go to the French part.  So, the country count for this trip might go up to 16! 

• Am getting back into my ancestry attempts again - the England and Wales census of 1911 has just been made available.  This won't help with my mum's family, or with Paul's family, who were all already in Australia by then, but it might help with tracking down some more information about my dad's parents.

Avis doesn't want Canberra customers any more!

All of a sudden what was going to be an easy part of the trip turned a bit troublesome.
Usually the trip between home and Sydney airport for this sort of a trip is a no-brainer - we hire a car.  Cheaper than flying, often quicker because you can leave exactly when you want to. Although it's more than 300km, there are less than 10 sets of traffic lights - it's multi-lane highway or freeway almost the whole way and there are rarely any traffic issues unless you get caught up in Sydney peak hour.  And it's definitely more convenient than flying, specially since the trip between home and Canberra airport has to done in a Canberra taxi - unreliable so you have to book one for hours earlier than you need to be there just in case they don't show up, radio always on some hideous talk back station, air conditioning never on even if it's 40 degrees outside and astonishingly expensive ($70 for 21 km to the airport) - usually I avoid them like the plague.
I've already booked the Avis car to get to Sydney at the start of the trip, no problems.
However, I've tried a couple of times over the last two months to book a car for the trip back from Sydney, only to have the website tell me that they are "sold out" for that day.  Turns out though that of course, they expect to have plenty of cars Sydney Airport that day and every day.  The actual issue is that they aren't prepared to hire one of them out for a one-way trip to Canberra.  One-way trip to Melbourne or Brisbane - that's fine, but not Canberra.
Other Avis outlets in Sydney will hire a car to me for that trip, but only with a $60 one-way fee on top - and that's cheap compared to the outrageous prices Thrifty, Hertz and Europcar have offered for the same sort of trip.  The cheapest one-way hire any of them have on offer ends up costing more than twice what I'd normally expect to pay.
So, we'll now be flying back from Sydney to Canberra for not a lot more money than hiring the car.  We'll get home later than we would if we drove - there are many Sydney-Canberra flights each day but most of them are in tiny planes with serious carry-on restrictions.  The first 737 flight to Canberra is about five hours after we arrive in Sydney, so I guess we'll spend some time in the Qantas Club  :-)
And, I'm going to avoid the taxi issue by booking a limo for pretty much the same money as the taxi would cost  :-)
I'm disappointed in Avis.  It's not a huge deal in the overall scheme of things, but I used to always be able to assume that I could hire a car to travel between Sydney and Canberra any time I need to, and now I can't. And, judging by the various forum postings I found while trying to work out what on earth was going on, I'm certainly not the only Canberra resident who has been caught out by this one recently.  I can only assume that Avis has done this because they decided that they're losing money (or not making enough!!) on one-way hires.  I wonder if they factored into that equation the number of previously loyal customers who will now start looking at other ways to travel instead?

199 days to go!

The countdown to our big trip away this year has just clicked under 200 days - it still sounds like a long time away but given how quickly January 2012 came and went, it will be time to leave before we know it.  The to-do list is gradually getting smaller and the packing list is getting longer, so I must be making some progress.
And, in the end the anniversary cruise was an easy decision.  Both of us have permission to take a couple of weeks leave, and we're booked on an 11 night South Pacific cruise with Royal Caribbean leaving Sydney on 4 Feb 2013 - we'll spend our 25th anniversary sailing towards New Caledonia.
We'll be extending an open invitation to everyone to join us - we're not planning anything special but we'd be more than happy for any friends and family to come along!
And Rose, if I win the Lotto between now and then, I'll be sending you a ticket :-)

25th wedding anniversary

Last week, Paul pointed out to me that next year is our 25th wedding anniversary.
Anyone who knows us won't be at all surprised that we then immediately thought that a cruise would be a really nice way to celebrate - Paul's suggestion actually but I wasn't going to argue  :-)
Of course, there's only the minor issues of paying for it, and also of getting leave from work when we'll only have been back for three months after this year's long holiday!  However, our employer is actually quite insistent that everyone should take at least two weeks  of their annual leave every year, and clearly that's a fine plan as far as we're concerned  :-)
So, it turns out there aren't actually a lot of cruises in February.  The vast majority of the cruises that time of year seem to be in the Mediterranean or Caribbean - since it's the northern winter they seem to be avoiding the colder places.   But we're going to do two separate Caribbean cruises this year, and the Mediterranean is a big part of our 2015 cruise.  There are a couple of interesting South American ones that are already sold out! and there are a few others but nothing that we can afford and that really appeals, specially given the cost of airfares and the amount of extra time it adds just flying there.....
So, if we do this, it will probably be somewhere close - these ones would all have us on board on our anniversary:
10 Night South Pacific Cruise
11 Night South Pacific Cruise
14 Night New Zealand Cruise
All three cruises are with Royal Caribbean, all leave from and return to Sydney so airfares aren't a problem.  We have been to almost all of the places on all three cruises, but in some ways that's not necessarily a bad thing - we know a little about each place now and have an idea about what to do, what we missed first time around, and what to avoid.
Definitely more thinking to be done here!

Holiday plans are slowly getting there

Happy 2012 everyone!
Now that it's this year, the next holiday is feeling like it's a bit more real, and I've finally done the last major booking - the flight home from Los Angeles.
Even though it means a stopover in Auckland, we're going to come home with Air New Zealand. For the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland we've booked a Skycouch - basically the two of us get three seats for only $600 more than the price of two, and these seats are set up so they can be a sort of a bed.  It's not long enough to stretch out on, but it's a guarantee of enough room for just a bit of comfort.  By this time we're going to be really tired and this is the best we can do short of selling the house to fly business class!
So, the final count of countries we'll set foot in is fifteen.  United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and New Zealand are only transit stopovers, but if it's good enough for the Century Club to count airport stopovers, I'm going to count them too  :-)
232 days until we leave!

Sunday 18 December - some final thoughts about the Week Fantastique

We really enjoyed ourselves on this cruise but just the same, I probably wouldn't cruise with P&O again unless it was for another family celebration.  If I was planning another 'local' cruise, I'd go back to Princess or try Royal Carribean or Celebrity or Holland America, all of which are just a little more my style of cruise.  There's no one thing in particular that Princess does enormously better than P&O, it's more that everything they do is just a little better.  And overall the Princess ships - the ones I've been on anyway - are definitely in a better shape than the two P&O ones I've been on.  Again, not that the P&O ones are bad, it's just the Princess ones are better.
Today I'm catching up on washing, which is of course the downside of deciding not to do any laundry on board. And, all three of us are having a bit of 'unseasickness'- feeling just a little woozy because the ship isn't rocking from side to side  :-)
We're also still unpacking - all three of us have the day off tomorrow as well, so hopefully we'll be ready to get back to our normal routine on Tuesday.  Then, I can get back to holiday planning - it's only 247 days until we leave on our next holiday!

Saturday 17 December - home

We're leaving the ship so early that we had to set a wake-up call, but I woke up before it went off anyway.  Since Paul missed the sail-away due to being confined to quarters, we made the effort to get up on deck in time to watch the ship go under the Gateway bridge.

Then we had a quick breakfast - at 5am!!!
The way they organise departures is that they split everyone up into about 20 different groups, and give each group a time and a place to meet.  Because we're in a minisuite we could go to the 'VIP departure lounge' to wait - and have coffee and pastries - until it was time to go to our specified meeting place (in the Casino), but as it happened, before it was time to go to the Casino they announced that everyone in our group could leave the ship.  We were off the ship before 6:30am.
Of course, we then had to wait for mother and Adam, but it wasn't too bad, we had a coffee and then sat around talking.  There was a bit of a panic when Adam arrived without Mother, but it turned out that she had been stopped and made to go to the purser's desk apparently because of a 1c discrepancy in her onboard account!  Anyway, she eventually arrived and we all went our separate ways.
While we were waiting though it became clear just how well organised the whole departure process is - there was a steady stream of people leaving the ship, there never more than 15 or 20 people waiting for a taxi or for their shuttle.  They get all 2,000 passengers off the ship in less than 3 hours, and by the time we left there were already people arriving and getting ready to check in for the next cruise.
Paul, Adam and I got a taxi to the airport.  We got there at about 10am, checked in for our 2pm flight, and then got a train to the city and looked around for a while.  They sure know how to charge on those trains - $84 return for the three of us!  As Paul said, it would have been cheaper to hire a car - I hired a car in Brisbane from about 7am to 5pm a couple of weeks ago for around $70 including petrol.
Anyway, we had a look around town, then came back and caught the flight home.  It cost $152 for under-cover car parking for just over a week - exactly as the Canberra Airport website had said.  It's not exactly cheap, but definitely cheaper than getting taxis - and Canberra taxis aren't particularly reliable anyway.  Anyway, we drove home via the shop where we picked up takeaways for dinner and then crashed.