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.

Friday 16 December - at sea

Had a nice quiet day today - lazed around and did very little apart from packing.  As usual our suitcases had to be outside the door sometime between 5 and 8pm so they could be off-loaded first thing in the morning.
I did discover though that we probably should have taken a little more effort to choose a departure time from the ship.  Because our flight isn't until 2pm we just agreed to let them offload us whenever they wanted to.  Trouble is that it turns out they offload the ship from the top down.  But Paul and I are on the top passenger deck and Adam is on the bottom one, so Paul and I have to be gone by 6:30 but Adam doesn't leave until about 8:30. We'll have to wait around at Portside for him - but we won't be alone though - Jonina and Josh have to leave at much the same time as we do, and Joanne only a little later, but they also have to wait for Mother who gets off the ship at the same time as Adam.
I've spent too much on ship's photos this trip - but they're a nice way of getting a memory of the trip and especially good for group photos.  However, I'll have to be more circumspect next year as three cruises' worth of photos could bankrupt us!  I'm really hoping that soon the cruise lines will stop wasting money and paper printing all of the photos and will instead do it all electronically and only print the ones you want.  Although, maybe they won't - P&O for example will happily sell you the .jpg version of any photo you want - for either $5 or $10 which is a huge rip-off anyway, but they also won't do this unless you first buy the printed copy.  So they're making a fortune from these photos - they probably aren't going to change any time soon.

Thursday 15 December - at sea

I'm having a real 'nothing' day today, and Paul is too:

I went to a talk this morning about the disembarkation procedure - because they'd promised something funny afterwards.  And it sort of was - a little funny song and dance from some of the crew.

Later I put $20 into a poker machine, got it up to $170 and played it down to $116, then went to another one, put $20 in, got it up to $50 then lost it.  So, I've still got a bit of poker machine money for tomorrow.
Other than that though, my main plan for these last two days of the cruise - to do as little as possible - is coming together nicely.

I did think about finally having a swim on a cruise ship today, but I left it too late - the weather has turned a bit nasty this afternoon - it's cloudy and quite rough, and I expect the pools will have been closed.  I did wander around and take a few photos though:

A view of the Atrium

Another view of the atrium

The reason they call it the Bengal Bar

Entrance to the main dining room

The MIX cocktail bar

Part of the Promenade Deck

Another reason to have a minisuite arrived while I was typing this - a complimentary tray of canapes - we had already had some earlier in the cruise and we weren't expecting another lot, but we weren't going to complain.  Unfortunately for Paul the main contents were two gigantic prawns.  However, we managed to chop the 'prawn-touched' pieces off the melon and proscuitto which he then ate, while I got the lettuce and prawns.  Yum.  All up I think we had four separate canape trays and a couple of fruit bowls 'on the house'.   However, if I had my time over I think I'd have either saved the money and gone for a normal balcony cabin,or splashed out even more and had a full-size suite - they're much  bigger, have more amenities, and aren't right under the elephants that live on the pool deck just above us!

Later:  formal night tonight, we had a group photo taken:

Adam yet again didn't have dessert; I'm more and more convinced he's a pod person, but first we'll see what happens when we get back to Canberra  :-)
At dinner tonight the ship's security showed up and started talking to the group of young men at the next table.  It was discreet enough that we couldn't hear what was said, but one guy was taken away and the rest got a good talking to at the least.  We're presuming under-age drinking, which P&O would never tolerate (they'd be in enormous amounts of trouble!)
The seas have become really rough tonight compared to the rest of the trip.  Seasickness bags are hanging from all the stair rails and we've seen evidence of them being used (eerk).
I just went out on the balcony to look at the waves - such that you can see when it's dark outside - and realised that the person on the next balcony is smoking.  Not only is this completely against the P&O rules, it's incredibly dangerous with this wind around - the ash or even the whole cigarette could go anywhere and fire is so dangerous on board a ship.
And it looks like the movement from the rough seas has almost completely removed all the new grouting they've so carefully installed around the broken tiles in our bathroom.  However, at least the toilet is working ok, so there's no more nasty leaks.
Some more towel animals have made an appearance too - the penguin vanished somewhere along the way but now we have a dog, an elephant, and two swans:

Wednesday 14 December - Port Vila, Vanuatu

Major impressions - beautiful scenery, but so hot!  Of course it's summer time in the tropics so I should expect this - but even the Queenslanders were commenting on the humidity so you can imagine how it hit us - we're used to heat, but Canberra doesn't understand humid  :-)

Here are a few different shots taken from our balcony:

Anyway, we got off the ship fairly early.  Our plan was to have a look at the markets near the ship, then get a taxi or taxi-bus into town and look around there.  Then in the afternoon, Paul and Adam have a 'Reef and Sports Fishing' excursion, while I'm doing a shorter 'Vila City Highlights' coach tour.

Later: Wow.  I think I was told on the afternoon tour that there are only about 20,000 people living in the vicinity of Vila - all I can say is that a huge proportion of them must own a taxi.  It was like organised chaos at the exit from the wharf, with taxis and taxi-buses everywhere.  We were accosted about a dozen times by drivers offering us a trip into the city, proposing to take us to 'better' markets or on tours to other parts of the island.  We stuck to our guns though and had a look at the markets first, then picked a taxi driver at random to take us back into the city. As we were doing this, two ladies off the cruise ship asked if they could join us - one of them was completely frightened by the people who were accosting them offering taxi fares, and the way it was being done, which I thought was sad as it clearly wasn't their intention to scare people but they were definitely very persistent.

We got to the city, mastered an ATM and bought a couple of things - mostly bottled water because it was so very hot.  Paul got a really nice shirt from a market in the city. And, the trip back was a doozy - I'm pretty sure we got an unlicenced taxi-bus, and let's just say that there's nowhere in Australia that you could see that bus outside of a scrap-heap  :-)   However, the driver was a nice guy and we got back in one piece, so it's all good.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of letting myself get dehydrated again and paid the price - just as I did at the Hoover Dam last year - with a vicious headache that took a couple of hours to shake off even with a heavy hit of Panadol.  And, we got back to be greeted by two workers in our cabin doing even more grouting in the bathroom, so hopefully they're happy with it now.  I gather that the ship is due for drydock next year and all I can say is that I hope that they're planning to completely gut the bathroom in our cabin.

My shore excursion in the afternoon was interesting.  The bus could have held 15 or so passengers, but only six people had signed up for this particular departure and two of them didn't show up.  So, the operators were unthrilled right from the start, although they really tried not to show it.  It was definitely one of those tours where they take you to places in the expectation that you'll spend money, and of course we did, but not anywhere near as much as they'd have gotten out of a busload of course.  On the other hand, leaving aside the commercial side of it they were friendly interesting people and we learned a lot about the local culture and way of life.  Here are a few pictures taken on the tour:

As I'm writing this, Paul and Adam are due back from their fishing trip - as it turns out though they had a fairly good time.  Adam caught the first fish and the biggest fish for the group, so needless to say my hopes that this might cure him of his desire to fish are a completely lost cause.  I'll add some photos of his fish later - and here they are - and just to be clear this was a 'catch and release' trip:

The first fish caught by anyone on their trip - a coral trout

And the biggest fish caught on the trip - a sweetlip