by Jim Bellomo | Dec 30, 2018 | Uncategorized
On Christmas Eve I wrote about how we got into the travel business so quickly because of a guy named Seth Wayne. I mentioned that Seth is the morning meteorologist on KOMO-TV here in Seattle. But he has another job. He hosts a weekly radio show all about travel. He has become the go-to guy for travel and cruising here in Seattle. His show, Adventures Await, is on KOMO radio every Sunday at 2:00 pm PST. If you aren’t here in Seattle to listen to it over the air, it is available online through TuneIn by clicking here. every Sunday. Even if I’m not on the show, it’s great with lots of super travel tips, interviews and facts.
Earlier this month Seth and I taped a show that was broadcast for the first time two weeks ago and because of the holidays, it was repeated again today. On the show he and I discussed the upcoming 2019 Alaska cruise season. I thought the show went really great and I tried to tape it to put in on my website so that everyone could listen but due to technical difficulties it wasn’t on the web and the only radio we have in the house sounds like garbage. But it was rerun today and I grabbed it. You can listen to it on my JKBellomo site by clicking here. Please keep in mind that due to legal restrictions I have to leave the show as it is on the radio with all ads and news/weather/traffic but you can fast forward through those if you want to. Hope you like it if you get a chance to listen.
One last thing. You can also get the show as a podcast on iTunes. Just search iTunes on a computer or in the Podcast app on an iOS device for Adventures Await. But keep in mind that they are about three months behind in posting the episodes so my first show that was taped back in July just got posted recently.
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
Saw this on Reddit today:
Buy a small bottle of perfume you have never tried on before going for a vacation and use it for while you’re there. At any point after your vacation, you get a sniff of it, it brings back those memories instantly.
I love that idea but don’t wear perfume, so all my vacation smells are about food. How about yours?
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 28, 2018 | Uncategorized
So if you read my last post about all the places we have been, we want to know—where we should go now. Here is our dilemma. One of the smartest ways to purchase a cruise is to buy it onboard your latest cruise. The cruise lines often offer some really great deals to get you to purchase your next cruise while you are enjoying your current one.
While we were on our last cruise in November, we bought a Celebrity cruise credit. We have bought one of these before because it allows you to take advantage of some great perks and lower prices on your next cruise as well as on the cruise you are on currently. It’s not an actual cruise. When we purchased it in October, we didn’t have to pick a time or a destination until later. The deposit is low and refundable but here is where we need your help. The current Celebrity cruise credit rules require that we choose a destination by December 31 of the year we buy it. So we have until this coming Monday to choose where we want to go.
When we purchased the cruise credit on Summit in October, the 2020 autumn deployment schedules were not out yet. We hoped that there were would be a cruise in that new group of Celebrity cruises announced between when we bought the credit and today that would appeal to us. We were specifically looking for a Pacific Coastal cruise for the fall of 2020 that would take us from here in Seattle to California. We have done these repositioning cruises before (some of our favorites) that often take place when the cruise lines move their ships from summer in Alaska to winter in the Caribbean. But so many of the cruise lines no longer send their ships on that route and Celebrity has stopped all together. While she has three ships in Alaska in the summer of 2020, two will go to Asia, one to Hawaii and then on Down Under. We have done these cruises before and are not interested in going back. Plus we really want a short, fairly inexpensive cruise. One that we can drive to and not have to fly. All of our options from Seattle or Vancouver are more than 10 days which is too long for us.
So nothing like that is available for the fall of 2020. We already are fully booked between now and then. We have our June 2019 Ireland/Iceland cruise, our July/August 2019 Alaska cruise with our grandkids and finally we are going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras in February 2020.
So, let’s open it up and say we are pretty much willing to go anywhere, anytime in the next two years. Based on all the places we have been, (see the previous post) where would you go? We have until Monday to decide. If you have an idea, please post it in the comments. I will let you know on New Year’s Day where we decided to go.
PS: Only qualifiers are that our destination must me someplace a cruise ship can go anytime after June 2020 and before April of 2021.
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 26, 2018 | Uncategorized
I love lists! It’s the end of the years so the magazines, newspapers, websites are all featuring best of 2018 lists so I am in hog heaven right now. So today I am posting my first list. Besides posting them here as a post, I have created a special page where they will always exist. See the main menu above.
Places we have been together
So let’s start my lists with a personal one…countries that Kathleen and I have visited. To get on this list, we have to visited this country on the ground (that means changing planes doesn’t count) and together.
- USA (of course we were born here)
- Canada (Our home away from home. We have so many friends there.)
- Italy (Our first overseas trip to find my ancestors)
- Vatican City (Ok, we know it’s tiny, but it is a country)
- England (Part of our second major trip in 2005)
- Scotland (Part of our second major trip in 2005)
- France (Part of our second major trip in 2005)
- Aruba (Our first real cruise through the Panama Canal on Celebrity’s Infinity)
- Panama
- Costa Rica
- Mexico
- Dominican Republic (One of our few Caribbean cruises on Celebrity’s Infinity)
- Bahamas
- Greece (Part of an amazing “Exotic Mediterranean” cruise on Celebrity’s Galaxy)
- Turkey
- The Ukraine
- Romania
- Spain (Part of an amazing Western Mediterranean cruise on Celebrity’s Century)
- Monaco (Ok, we know it’s tiny, but it is a country)
- British Virgin Islands (One of our few Caribbean cruises on Celebrity’s Solstice)
- St. Maarten
- Singapore (Maybe my favorite cruise ever on Azamara’s Quest)
- Thailand
- Vietnam
- China
- New Zealand (Part of a wonderful cruise on Celebrity’s Century)
- Australia
- Belgium (Visited on our Baltic cruise on Celebrity’s Eclipse)
- Germany
- Sweden
- Finland
- Russia
- Estonia
- Denmark
- Guatemala (Our second trip through the Panama Canal on Celebrity’s Infinity)
- Columbia
- The Netherlands (Almost a week here before our British Isles cruise on Celebrity’s Silhouette)
- Ireland
This summer we will be back in Ireland and adding Iceland to this list. And of course we have been back to a bunch of these places numerous times. And there are many we would like to visit again.
by Jim Bellomo | Dec 25, 2018 | Uncategorized
Meet Jason and Seth in one of their favorite places, on a trip.
So a couple of days ago I gave you the first half of how we wound up in the travel business…this fast. As I mentioned in my first “How did this happen” post, we were just going to start training last January and Kathleen might get into the actual business in March or April and I would follow when my time with my other business was over in two or three or more years. But a year ago, on Christmas Eve (2017), we met two of our favorite people for breakfast at my favorite breakfast place, Lola in downtown Seattle.
First let me introduce these two guys—Seth and Jason. We first met Seth on Twitter about six years ago when he moved from Eugene to Seattle to become the morning weather person on KOMO television news. From the start he would talk about cruising and traveling on the air so we started following each other on Twitter and then he followed us and we began a dialogue that led to a friendship. In the morning when I would ride my exercise bike, Seth and I would text back and forth with Seth about cruising and travel because I might have been the only person texting him at 4:30 am. We had never met but we were becoming friends.
In November 2014 we (Kathleen and I) went on our second Panama Canal cruise with our buddies the Martini Mates. When we arrived in our stateroom on Celebrity’s Infinity in Fort Lauderdale we found two bottles of wine. One was from our travel agent at the time (the amazing Norma Jean) and the other was from Seth. He had tracked us down, ordered wine and had it delivered to us…and we had never even met him. What a guy.
When we returned from the Canal we thanked him and told him that we just had to meet sometime. About six months (and a lot texting and Twitter) later he asked us if we wanted to join him and his husband Jason for lunch on a Holland America cruise ship while it was in port for a media day. We jumped at the chance as we would finally be able to meet him and talk in person. Since then we have met up with Seth and Jason a whole bunch of times, they have been to our place, we have been to theirs and we have become friends.
Which brings us to last Christmas Eve. We had told the guys that we had a surprise to tell them about when we met. You see the biggest thing that Seth and I have in common is that we both LOVE to plan travel. We will literally both grab computers after dinner and price airfare just for fun (seriously…much to Kathleen and Jason’s exasperation). When we met, that morning we told them we were going to be travel agents/consultants with Expedia.
They were thrilled for us and Seth asked me a kind of a strange question. He asked, “Will you be doing group travel?” I told him, “I guess we will. We haven’t really started yet.” That was the extent of it. We spent the rest of breakfast just talking about travel and stuff as we always do.
Then about 10 days later, Seth called me and asked if now that we had started our training, if we would be willing to help him plan and book a cruise for some friends to celebrate his 40th birthday in September 2018. He figured that we might end up with 20 or 25 people on a three-day Royal Caribbean cruise on Explorer of the Seas. First, I was beyond gratified that Seth would trust us with this. He has never been a huge fan of travel agents. His feeling was (and I can verify that it is the truth) that he knew more than they did about travel and cruising. Second, I was scared to death that we might screw it up. I had booked a bunch of cruises over the years but just for us. And I had never done a group. And we had done about three hours of training at that point. YIKES! But we said yes. How hard could it be? One of those situations where we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
The first thing I learned was…we couldn’t do it half way. We couldn’t book a group cruise with Kathleen starting in March or April or with me starting in 2021. We had to go all in right then. We really had no choice but to go all-in in when Seth invited more than 80 people thinking he would get 20-30 people and we wound up sailing in September with 62. If I do say so myself, the cruise was a HUGE success. There will be more about this cruise in future posts but for now, I just need to thank Seth and Jason for putting their faith in us. And for being our great friends.
Lastly, MERRY CHRISTMAS!
“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” —Thomas Aquinas