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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I want to wait until tomorrow to finish my story about how we got into the travel business. Today I want to talk about gifts. Pretty appropriate since tomorrow is Christmas Eve and the next day Christmas.
About 15 years ago I stopped giving our children things for Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, we have three between us. Kathleen has a daughter (Michelle) who is married to Brian. I have a son (Josh) who is married to Cynthia and a daughter (Jenna) who is married to Joel. At the time I stopped giving presents, there were no grandchildren in the picture. Instead of things, I give them experiences.
In the beginning (before grandchildren) I would take all six of them out to do something together. This in itself was a pretty difficult thing to do when coordinating all their schedules. On Christmas morning they would open a box and inside it would tell them what we were doing that year. In the early years it was usually a play or show of some kind. For instance we saw touring companies of Lion King, Phantom of the Opera and The Blue Man Group along with some traveling Cirque de Soleil shows. Then along came our grandson and Jenna and Joel moved across the mountains to the Wenatchee area and they started getting experiences of their own without all of us. I kept giving them experiences but pretty much stuff they could do by themselves like dinners out, overnight hotels stays, airfare to Hawaii, etc.
But I kept giving the other four kids who lived near us (I call them kids but they range in age from 40 to 38) experiences here with us. We’ve done cooking classes, dinners at the Herb Farm (an incredible dining experience), more Cirque shows, cocktail tours and the really big one…three nights in Las Vegas. That was the year we took Jenna, Joel, Mason (grandson) and Maylee (granddaughter) to Disneyland as their Christmas experience.
The point I am trying to make here is this, giving experiences has been a win-win for me and our kids. First I win because not only do I get to give them something, I get to do it with them. I can honestly say, I have thoroughly enjoyed every experience we have done with them. (Well there was one cooking class that was a huge BUST but I did love going with them.) Second they win because to be honest, our kids do OK. They really don’t need any more things in their lives. Especially things I might pick out for them.
I should add that this idea has rubbed off on our kids. We opened our presents with Jenna, Joel and the grandkids on Wednesday and they gave us a trip to the zoo. Now I love the zoo but what I was really thrilled in getting was being able to go with them! That’s the experience I love.
So I want to encourage everyone who has adult kids, consider giving them experiences. Even better, give them an experience that you can do together. Sometimes the gift of time is worth so much more than a new toaster.
PS: Just to make this travel-related I can tell you what we got the grandkids this year. A seven night cruise on Ovation of the Seas this July. We have talked so much about cruising with them that we just wanted to share that with them so they can see why we love it so much. I can’t tell you what we got the other kids because we haven’t given it to them yet. Maybe tomorrow after we open gifts.
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ?