by Jim Bellomo | May 19, 2019 | Uncategorized
This is a picture I took yesterday because I found these (photo above) when I was looking for something else that I wanted to take with us tomorrow when we fly to Edinburgh. What you are seeing is the SeaPass card (combo room key and onboard credit card for you non-cruisers) from every cruise we have ever taken (except the one on Carnival we don’t tell anyone about). Starting in the upper left with our first Alaskan cruise on the old Holland America Westerdam in 2000 all the way through out Fall Foliage cruise last October on Celebrity’s Summit. Those SeaPass cards represent a lot of great times with a lot of great people.
The trip we leave on tomorrow will include our 26th cruise. Not as many as many of our friends (including our buddy Seth who has taken more than 65 cruises) but we think it’s pretty good. This time we will be adding a SeaPass card from Celebrity’s Reflection headed from Dublin to Belfast, on to two ports in Iceland and then back to Cork and Dublin Ireland before we fly home. Before we ever get to the cruise we will be staying five nights in Edinburgh, six nights with our fellow Martini Mates, Paul and Gail in the Yorkshire region of England and then three nights pre-cruise in Dublin,. Lots of travel and that’s just how we like it.
We invite you to join us as I will try my best to (and since I won’t spend my entire days driving like I did in Arizona) post some pics and notes every day we are on the road. So come back here often and let us know what you think by commenting.
Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity.
—Bo Bennett
by Jim Bellomo | Mar 18, 2019 | Uncategorized
Old Tombstone Courthouse
My favorite door
The view as you enter the Arizona-Sonora Museum
Ram
At Arizona-Sonora Museum
Cactus blossom
Well I had high hopes of posting everyday on this trip but unlike a cruise, there is no real downtime. If we aren’t touring, then I am driving. When we go on a cruise, the captain drives and I have time to post. Evenings have been full of just downloading and processing photos so those get taken up as well.
Today we are in Sedona and I don’t have anything to do while a wonderful young lady cleans our room. Got a bunch of photos processed and now I can tell you about our adventures in Tucson, where we spent three days.
We got down to Tucson just before noon and met up with Lee who used to live in our condo complex in Redmond. He and I were on the condo board together for a few years. He sold his place about three years ago and moved down here where he bought a beautiful home. We stopped and saw his place and then we were off to lunch with him at a great restaurant called Wildflowers. It’s one of a big conglomerate of unique restaurants that started in Tucson and now stretches all over the place. I did a link to the restaurants because during our stay we would end up eating at three of them and they were all outstanding…and fun. You should check and see if they have one of them near you.
After lunch we headed into our Tucson AirBnB (I need to do an entire post on why we are now using AirBnBs most of the time) which was in the University district of Tucson. It was a very funky, cool, bungalow and it was huge. One of the best parts of AirBnBs is that you get an entire place for a great price. So we had a living room, dining room, almost gourmet kitchen, TV room, bedroom and bathroom for a lot less than the price of a hotel.
I covered the rest of that day in my last post which you can read here if you like so on to the next morning. Our good friends Bob and Judy from Chilliwack, BC headed down the next morning to meet us and then we were going to take a long “tootle” as Bob calls it (a nice long drive) to Tombstone and Bisbee even further south in Arizona. Bob and Judy arrived around 10:00, we swapped cars and headed south.
Had a great drive and a great time yakking away at each other for most of it. Just about every topic in the world comes up when the four of us are together. It took us about 90 minutes and we arrived in historic Tombstone, home of the OK Corral. Bob had been there a few years back (I think he said 1984) and back then then did fake gunfights out in the streets. Today they do them all either indoors or in outside areas that you have to pay to see them. I am sure this is because of two things. First to make some money on them them and second because of the proliferation of mass shootings around the world. The idea of having everyone in town shooting at each other is not really a good one.
It was cool and very windy so we decided we weren’t going to stay very long. We had lunch and walked around a little as well as doing a little shopping before we headed further south to Bisbee, a cute little copper mining town and scene of an entire series of books by JA Jance that came up a bunch that day. I just wanted to see all the places I had been reading about for years. Got to take some pics, we stopped at an old copper mine and then headed back by way of Sierra Vista (also in the books).
After a quick stop to get refreshed at our place, we were back out looking for Barrio Historico in downtown Tucson. We didn’t have a clear idea of where it was because the books and websites we had read about it only gave us streets that bordered it, not really great directions. You can’t put a street without a number in your GPS. After driving all over the place and never finding what we were after, we gave up and headed for dinner at another of the restaurants that was part of the Wildflower family, Culinary Dropout. Totally different than Wildflowers in a big way and totally cool. Had a great meal before heading home and sending Bob and Judy off on their way to a hotel and then the next morning, back to Sun City where they are staying with friends.
Our Saturday started with me taking a long walk around the University of Arizona. It reminded me of my walks around Oregon State in Corvallis or Auburn University in Alabama in that it is a actual campus, with a gate and an entrance. It has spread outside of the original place but it still feels like a “real” college as opposed to a commuter school like the one I went to (Cal State Fullerton).
Around 10:00 Kathleen and I decided to take a stab at finding Barrio Historico again because we wanted to see some of the doors we have photographs of in our home. If you have ever visited us, you know that we are cuckoo for door photos (we have almost 50 hanging in our place) and some of them came from this famous barrio. This time we found it and spent about an hour driving through and taking door, window and gate shots. Some of them will be in my Flickr feed later on. My favorite is in the group a the top.
At 11:30 we met my old high school friend Randy again for lunch at her son’s restaurant, Reilly’s Pizza. (That’s her with us at right.) If you are ever in Tucson, it’s right downtown in an old, completely refurbished mortuary. The food is amazing as is the decor and service. Of course it helps if you are eating with the bosses Mom. We had eaten there four years before (to the very day) and had a wonderful lunch and the food was still just as amazing. Truly with a visit to downtown.
After lunch Randy took us to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum high in the hills west of the city. It’s much more than a museum and definitely worth the 30 minute drive and admission price. Not only is it a museum, it is also a zoo, aquarium and more featuring desert animals, fish and birds. We spent almost two hours roaming the grounds and of course with me taking pictures. I have included a few above and the rest are (or will soon be) on my Flickr feed (at right). After a wonderful day with Randy, she headed off to meet her husband for a business dinner and we went to our third restaurant related to Wildflowers, Blanco way up in the foothills above Tucson. Great food, atmosphere and service one more time. The Fox Concept Restaurants are outstanding and we will look for them again as we travel. Guessing we will get to try both of them in San Diego on our next trip down.
And that concludes day two and three in Tucson, the next morning we were up early and headed to Sedona on the backroads with a stop at Biosphere 2. More about that later.
by Jim Bellomo | Mar 13, 2019 | Uncategorized
Back Camera
I have written in the past about the Martini Mates but I am just not sure I have written about them on this site. So here’s a short bit of explanation about who we are and a sad bit of news about one of our best friends—a Martini Mate.
Back in 2005 we booked our second Celebrity Cruise on Infinity that would take us on a short repositioning trip from Vancouver, BC to San Francisco, CA. As is our habit, as soon as we booked the cruise, we joined the Cruise Critic roll call (click here if you don’t know what that is) for it. Little did we know how life changing joining that roll call would be. There were about 100 people posting on the roll call but one day (about six months prior to the cruise) we started discussing the Martini Bar on Infinity. Now none of us were big fans of martinis but it was fun to discuss all the different kinds that X serves in its many martini bars throughout their fleet.
During that discussion someone suggested that we (everyone on the roll call) start calling ourselves the Martini Mates. This caught on and pretty soon we were all a bunch of Martini Mates. By the time we all arrived in Vancouver for the cruise, a bunch of us who had done a TON of posting felt like we were good friends. Many of us gathered the night before the cruise for a pre-cruise cocktail party that was organized by Carol Preisman who is the wife of the god of shore excursions Mike. We met in the bar at the Sheraton Wall Center hotel and when I walked into the hotel, Carol came up and I put out my hand to shake hers. She said, “I’m from the South honey. We don’t shake, we hug.” And she did. And I did. And I made a friend who lasted from that day until last night when we lost Carol.
Carol would always say that she wasn’t sure why she and I were friends. Neither was I. We were pretty much the opposite of each other. She was a conservative, reserved Southern Belle of the highest order and I was a liberal, loud, ex-hippie from California. And we became friends. And every time we saw each other or she would introduce me to someone, she would say, “Not sure why Jim and I are friends…but we are.”
Of course there were many Martini Mates on that cruise but for some reason, six of us stayed Martini Mates. We still correspond with others from that 2005 cruise. We have sailed with some of those people as well. Over the years we have added more folks to the Martini Mates but the six of us were the core—Bob, Jude, Mike, Carol, Kathleen and me.
Those four people have been a huge part of our lives since the day we met them. We have sailed with Mike and Carol at least eight times and done a couple of land trips with them as well. They have stayed at our place and we have stayed at theirs. Yes, we were closer to Bob and Jude but that’s just because we were geographically closer since they lived in BC and Mike and Carol lived in Florida but the six of us were still the best of friends. And when we were able to travel to all the parts of the world together, we felt like no time had passed between trips.
When we returned from the original trip in 2005, Carol wanted us all to be able to have a place to keep talking to each other on the original Cruise Critic roll call so she started the Martini Mates “friends of Cruise Critic” board that we still post on to this day. This morning it was filled with love for both Carol and Mike.
I am posting more photos than I usually post because when I went to look for them, I found so many that I loved of us with our Mates all over the world. Bob and Jude never did the really long and adventurous trips—Bob hates to fly. But we still went everywhere together.
This morning after I had found out about Carol passing I took a long walk and was thinking about all the places we had been with Mike and Carol. Besides the initial Martini Mate foray in 2005, we sailed with them to Alaska twice, to SE Asia from Singapore to Hong Kong, through the Panama Canal in 2014, to the Baltic a few years before that, on the eighth voyage of Solstice in the Caribbean and Hawaii.
So that’s kind of a short history of the Martini Mates. The Mates suffered our first huge loss when Jude passed away a few years ago. Today we lost Carol. And she will be missed but I like to think that she is undoubtedly in a heavenly Martini Bar, sipping her chocolate martini with Jude and another of our group, “The Straw.” She and Jude are rolling their eyes as “The Straw” (that’s a whole other story) tells the story of how she became “The Straw” for the 1 millionth time.
We love you Carol and will miss you. I wish I could see you right now to give you that hug because you taught me that “we don’t shake hands, we hug.”
by Jim Bellomo | Feb 9, 2019 | Uncategorized
On Thursday a very nice young lady called the agency and said she had driven by and seen our sign and could someone help her with some questions she had about taking a cruise. Actually, the cruise wasn’t for her, it was for her 70+ year old Mom and Dad and two of their friends who would be visiting her this summer from Japan. They wanted to take a cruise-tour to Alaska and since she (nor they) had ever cruised, she wanted to come in and discuss it. I told her “we are here to help.”
About two hours later she came in and we had a very nice talk. I found out a bunch of stuff about what her parents and their friends were looking for in the way of a cruise. I told her that I thought I had all the info I needed and that I would have some options for her before this weekend was over.
This morning she e-mailed me some additional comments and we went back and forth with questions and answers until she used that horrid word that I have learned to hate…Costco.
I have a huge love-hate relationship with Costco. I have been a member forever. We probably spend thousands of dollars there every year. We get all our gas there, we get most of our grocery staples, most of our meat, all our paper goods and a bunch of other stuff from them. Heck, my son has worked at Costco for almost 20 years. But when someone mentions them when talking about travel, it drives be nuts. Especially someone like this young woman.
Her question was typical, “I see that if I buy the cruise from Costco, they will give me a Costco gift card for $350. Can you match that with a discount?” The answer is no, we can’t. And we shouldn’t. Costco uses travel as a loss leader and another way to serve their membership. It’s the way Costco pretty much does everything. The prices are lower to us because they make much of their money selling memberships and they make a bunch more selling prime space in their stores to companies. You know that big line of products on the left when you go into a Costco? The companies that make those products pay Costco to be there. As well they should. It’s prime real estate and the fact that their product is there and not on a shelf in the back means they will sell a BUNCH of extra product.
But Costco should not be in the travel business. Not because they compete unfairly (which they do) but because the people you are dealing with when you buy travel from them don’t have a clue about what they are selling.
If you think about it, Costco people seldom have a clue about what they are selling product-wise. My son is in the “Majors” department. That’s the one that sells TVs, computers, etc. He knows that stuff. He ought to after almost 20 years. But if you go into his department when he isn’t there, you might end up talking to a new employee that started last week about exactly which TV or computer you are going to buy. Now this if just fine if you know exactly what computer you want. If you know how much RAM, whether you want a traditional hard drive or an SSD or one of many decisions you need to make to buy a computer. If you are ready to make the purchase and have done all your research and you feel like you are an expert—buy it. But if you have no clue about computers, and if you are a smart buyer, you either wait until my son is there (LOL) or you go someplace that knows about computers.
This is even more true when it comes to cruises. If Costco wants to sell car rentals and flights and hotels, that’s fine. Those things really don’t have many variables, while cruises do. If you are going to rent a car, you rent a car. You know what a Ford or a Honda are. If you want to book a hotel and you see a Hyatt on an online website, then you pretty much know what you are getting (although a good travel agent would know about good restaurants and sights near a hotel that was just as nice.)
When you buy a cruise from Costco you are buying it either online or from someone on the phone. If online then you better know exactly what you want stateroom-wise, exactly which ports you want to go to, exactly what perks you are getting, which dining plan you want, etc. Cruises have hundred of variables. But if you don’t, you are in trouble. And this nice young lady who came in to buy her parents a cruise said exactly that, “I don’t know anything about cruises.” If she decides to buy one from Costco online, she will be in trouble.
Let’s say she decides to make a phone call and talk to someone instead of buying her travel online? Will she talk to someone who knows all about cruising? Probably not. In fact my guess is that she will probably talk to someone who has NEVER been on a cruise. Not one. Sure, they may have read some brochures or studied the websites of the cruise lines they sell but have they sailed 20+ times? No. They work in a big phone room (you can’t go to your local Costco and book a cruise—you can only do it online or on the phone), where the next person who calls gets the next employee who is free to answer.
Of course this means when you call back because you need to make a change or something is a problem, forget trying to deal with the first person you talked to (“Can’t I talk to Joe, I really liked him so much when I called last time.”), that person may not even work there any longer. If the turnover at the Costco travel phone room is anything like the turnover at your local Costco, who knows who you will be talking to and what their level of expertise is. And imagine that this nice ladies parents (who, according to what she told me, speak Japanese predominantly) have a problem in boarding or anywhere along their way and they try to call Costco for help. They will get connected to the next person who answers the phone. Then they will get to explain their problem all over again. If they book with us and there is a problem, they will call me. I will know their circumstances and I will deal with the situation. And if I am not here, Mark
I have written before about my friend Seth Wayne. Next to Rick Steves he is probably Seattle’s number one travel expert. When it comes to cruising he even knows more than Rick. Before Kathleen and I got into the travel business he pretty much did not use a travel agent. He and I had discussions about this and his feeling was that he knew more than 95% of the travel agents he had met. As his friend and someone who he discusses travel with a lot, I agree with him. But that isn’t true of all travel agents and he knows that. That’s why when he found a travel agent who knew as much as he did, he started trusting him with his travel instead of booking it all online. (That would be me.)
You see Seth could book online if he wanted to because he is an expert. He knows if he is going to book a cruise, exactly what he will get from a particular cruise line (after 65+ cruises he should) and he knows exactly what to ask for if he buys it online. I have a lot of friends like Seth because we travel and cruise so much. They know what they want, they could book their travel themselves. But they don’t anymore—I do. Because they know that besides knowing as much as they know about travel, I have the time to look at all kinds of options and catch things they might miss. Not because they don’t know those things but because they are so busy they would have missed them. Sometimes they catch things I miss and they call me and I get them what they caught.
This nice young lady who called me actually told me, “I don’t know anything about cruising.” Should she book online or with Costco? You tell me. Will her parents have a great cruise if she books online or with Costco? Maybe. Will it be as good a cruise as it would have been if I booked with my expertise and the combined expertise of my fellow agents in our office? Probably not. If they have a problem, will they have someone they have met face-to-face to stand up for them, to fix things, to make things right—NO!
When I started this rant, I thought this will help with my frustration but it hasn’t. I have e-mailed the young lady and told her we needed to talk before I did any options for her parents. I had to do this because after being burned recently by a prospective client who had me do hours of research to find just the right cruise for her husband and his father, they went off and bought it at Costco. That is crushing. And I have resolved to never do that again. So as soon as someone mentions the C word, I stop working altogether until I can have a discussion with them. That’s where I am now. I have tried to reach her to no avail and have left her messages and e-mails but have not heard back.
Too many people today know the price of everything and the value of nothing. —Ann Landers
by Jim Bellomo | Feb 5, 2019 | Uncategorized
Over the last few days I have been working with two different clients on two different trips. One has me looking for a Caribbean cruise, first for next Christmas and then when that proved way too expensive and hard to find, one in February of 2020. The other was looking for a short cruise to Cuba.
I did most of the planning by going back and forth with e-mails. They would ask questions, inquire about alternate cruises, ask about travel insurance, different types of staterooms and other types of questions. I would send replies with new options for them. In all, I would guess that I exchanged at least 10 long e-mails with each of these wonderful folks.
But the one thing that both of them had in common was that they started every e-mail by apologizing for asking for so many options, for so many changes. On almost every e-mail reply the first line was, “Sorry to be bothering you with this,” or “I hate to ask you about a different option.” I just want to make one thing clear…you aren’t bothering me.
I have had this happen before with close friends. One of my best traveling buddies asks me about airfare and always starts by saying, “only when you have time.” Another very close friend spends a lot of his time looking at travel arrangements to have me book them. When I ask why he did all the research he said, “I didn’t want to bother you.”
If I was bothered by people asking me to find out about different types of travel, I wouldn’t be doing this as my “funtirement” job if I didn’t love looking for travel. I am at a point in my life where I don’t really have to do this job. And I really do love it…most of the time.
Sometimes because I look so hard for different options, I find something truly important. As an example, in looking for the Cuba cruise for these clients I discovered that if they went to Cuba after March 18, the overnight cruises were much shorter than after. The March 18 cruise (and those before that one) have an overnight in Havana. They arrive at 8:00 am on day 1 and then don’t leave until 3:00 pm on day 2. After the March 18 cruise, they arrive at the same time but leave Havana at 6:00 am on day 2 so even though they get a full day and an evening on the island, they don’t get a second day.
We also looked at another cruise that did an entire day in Havana and then sailed away at 5:00 pm and then did an entire day on the south side of the island in Cienfuegos from 8:00 to 5:00. But I also read a lot of reviews by other travelers that had been there that one of the things they loved the most was the evening time in Havana and this cruise didn’t give them that. And I found other options. They ended up getting the exact cruise they wanted along with all the visas and travel insurance they need.
I loved finding that kind of stuff. Digging to find the best thing for the clients. See the smile on my face. You aren’t bothering me…really
I like bothering people and stirring things up. –Tim Daly
