Not sure if you remember this, but we have a group of six people who travel every October. We call ourselves the October Bunch. We have traveled together every October since 2023, when we sailed on Oceania’s Vista from Montreal to Miami. Since then, we have done river cruises on both the Douro in Portugal and the Columbia River. And since it is almost October, we are off to sail again with the Bunch.

The October Bunch includes me, Kathleen, my brother Steve (of the famous Steve test of restaurants), my sister-in-law Jamie, and our incredible Florida friends Mike and Cathy. Kathleen and I have been traveling with Mike since 2005, and I consider him one of my two best friends in the world.

This year, our trip will start in Chicago this Saturday, and we will spend four days touring the city. We haven’t been there together since 2013. (I was back in 2014 to deal with my youngest brother’s death, but that doesn’t count as a city visit. Jamie and Steve have been there most recently, and our other two Bunchers haven’t been there for more than 25 years.)This should be fun.

We are in Chicago from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday morning, when we rent a car and drive north to the home of cheese and beer—Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am pretty sure none of us have been there before. We stay two nights at a really cool hotel (which you will see when we get there). Then, on Friday morning, we board the Viking Octantis for a seven-night cruise that takes us to five of the six Great Lakes (we don’t get to Superior).

We are very excited about the cruise because, after all our years of cruising, this is an entirely new kind of ship we have never been on before. In fact, as cruise ships go, only two like it exist in the world: Octantis and her sister ship, Polaris. Octantis holds only 374 passengers in 187 staterooms, so it is much smaller than a Viking Ocean ship and larger than a Viking River boat.

As an expedition ship, she spends most of the year in either the Arctic or the Antarctic. On the way between her two main destinations, she visits the Great Lakes and the Caribbean. This gives us a chance to check her out. She has a lot of very cool gear, including Special Operations Boats for exploring, Zodiacs, and even two six-man submarines (John and Paul). The ship has a scientific lab for oceanic exploration.

You can see our route at the top of this page. We love where this cruise ends… when we sail into Lake Ontario (NOT Lake America) and disembark in Toronto, one of our favorite cities. We will spend the night so we can see our good friends Tim and Perry. It’s been way too long since we last saw them.

That’s the coming two weeks. I will be blogging away, and as always, I will have photos. I hope to use what I learned in Belgium two weeks ago on this trip.

“An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore, an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.”    —Reinhold Messner