Time to sail again

Who would have thought that we would be doing another world cruise this soon? We both wanted to do one again because the first one was so fabulous, but we thought a year or two at least would pass. But, life intervened and here we are booked to leave in just a few weeks.

This time we are sailing on the Tahitian Princess with our most traveled cruise line. We do get many nice perks for being in their Elite status and we have always enjoyed our cruises with Princess. At about 30,000 tons and carrying 670 passengers, TP is the smallest cruise ship we have sailed on. In fact, about half the tonnage of the QE2.

The itinerary includes about 50% ports that will be new to us. Of the remaining 50%, there are very few, maybe only one, we do not look forward to revisiting. And that one would be- Ho Chi Minh City. We just might stay on the ship for that one. If you want to know why, check this post.

In addition to the full world cruise, we are staying onboard for the extension that includes Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Tallinn and St. Petersburg. We have long wanted to visit St. Petersburg, so the extension is a wonderful bonus for us. We have been only to Amsterdam and Copenhagen on that segment of the cruise and look forward to returning to those great cities.

Before we booked, we sent our passports off the State Department for renewal. Luckily for us, the State Department is operating efficiently and our passport package arrived about 3 weeks from the date we mailed it. And, our contacts with the customer service people at State were incredible. In a time when every customer service contact is a nightmare, the State Dept. people were friendly, cheerful, pleasant, spoke clearly and gave us good news.

Now we are tracking the progress of our visas at the visa service. We need to acquire passports through the service for only China and India. Australia is an electronic document easily acquired online by self-service and the remaining visas will be acquired by Princess and charged to our onboard account.

Although no shots are required this time, we did just return to the County Public Health Clinic Travel unit for the last shot in our Hepatitis A series. We are now fully immunized for the standard travel package.

Next task will be planning the packing. New challenges this time include the need to fly back from Stockholm bringing airline baggage restrictions into play. Last time, we traveled round trip Fort Lauderdale and the QE2 had a baggage room and baggage master. We were able to take 9 suitcases between us with no problem or additional fees. This time we can take without additional fees 4 checked bags weighing no more than 50 pounds each and the usual carryons. The good news is that there are not anywhere near as many formal nights eliminating at least one suitcase.