Well, as expected, Princess has just been forced to cancel all their Australian cruises up to 19 December 2021, which includes both Paul and Sandy's little cruise from Brisbane to Sydney in November, and the Melbourne-Adelaide-Melbourne cruise that all three of us were doing in December.
No cancellation of our two New Zealand cruises (February and March 2022) yet, but I think it's only a matter of time.
As I'm writing this, there are seven "upcoming cruises" showing on the page.
This time last year I'd have been astounded at the thought that I'd be standing here typing away about how few of these cruises I think will go ahead. But, at this point, I think that five of them are already lost causes - the only two I really hold out any hope for are the ones in 2023.
Adam's eclipse cruise has an interesting story. If you know Adam, you'll know that in the past he has travelled to Cairns, China and the USA to see eclipses. The next even vaguely accessible one crosses a tiny piece of Australia near Exmouth in April 2023. At first Adam was hoping to simply go there, but he realised quite quickly - and the people of Exmouth have started talking about this too - that there simply isn't the infrastructure there to support a stack of people visiting to view the eclipse. Add to that the fact that Adam can't drive, so staying a long distance away and driving there on the day really isn't an option either. So, since most of the totality occurs over the ocean, Adam asked me to check to see if anyone was running a cruise to see it and I really shouldn't have been surprised to see that P&O has one all planned - the cruise lines like to do this because they can charge more and they know lots of people will be interested. Adam suggested that Paul and or myself might like to come too, but we soon realised that we're already on a cruise at that time - different ship though. However, then we realised that our itinerary has us in that part of the ocean at the time of the eclipse. So we're hoping that although it's not specifically being advertised as an eclipse cruise, they may well be planning for our ship to be somewhere under the totality zone too!
Well, the cruise plans are changing again.
We've decided that committing to the Dubai - London cruise in June next year is a risk too far. When I booked it, it seemed so far in the future that "of course Covid-19 will be dealt with by then". But now it's only just over a year until that cruise sails, and we still don't even know if Australians will be allowed to leave the country by then (or return if we do!), let alone if cruising will have restarted. And that particular cruise goes to seven different countries, each of which will be in their own (impossible to predict) situation when it comes to Covid-19.
So, we're in the process of cancelling that cruise, and also a Perth to Brisbane cruise that we had booked for February 2023, and replacing them both with a round Australia cruise from Brisbane in March-April 2023. I've always wanted to do that cruise - Princess runs one a few times a year - but it's comparatively expensive and I had been thinking about it as part of our "tour Australia when we're too old to want to go overseas" travel plans. Maybe what I'm saying is that we'll reach that point in 2023!!
Due to cancellation of two different cruises Paul and Adam had quite a generous amount of 'Future Cruise Credit' with P&O, and they have decided to use it on a cruise to New Zealand in 2022.
Although he has been to the USA and a number of Asian countries, Adam has never been to New Zealand, and it's such a lovely place that hopefully Paul will enjoy himself even though we have been there many times.
And, cruising out of Brisbane means a chance for them to see the family before or after as well!
Well, the idea of cruising to New Zealand and staying for a while afterwards in January 2022 is now looking a bit risky. A day or so ago, murmurings started from the Government that overseas flights might not even start again until next year. This would mean that getting a flight back from NZ after the cruise could be a serious challenge - we would always have been competing with the 'end of school holiday' crowd and now unless the NZ bubble was properly in place before-hand we'd be competing with huge numbers of people who just wanted to see family and friends again after this very long period of being unable to do so.
Problem solved - I booked another cruise. As well as the 18 January cruise from Sydney to Auckland we're now also booked on the next cruise which is from Auckland back to Sydney. The cruise back is a slightly different itinerary which includes Picton and Wellington instead of Christchurch and Melbourne.
Of course we still have no idea if cruising will have even restarted by January. This just means that if cruising is okay but flights are a problem, we'll be able to get home. And since the cruise lines are currently being far more generous than usual about their cancellation fees, we have until December before we definitely need to make a decision.
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.
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:
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!
