Have I mentioned how bad Los Angeles drivers are?...

November 27, 2024

Our day didn’t start too well when we arrived at the rental car agency (Sixt) at 0730 and found that they changed their hours and wouldn’t open until 0900. Bummer. Kathy arrived to pick us up a little before 0700 so we figured we’d be on the road about 0800. Nope, didn’t get going until after 0930! Which meant we would be going through LA right at rush hour. To kill time, we had a nice breakfast but didn’t make up for LA in rush hour. In the rain. With the worst (and scariest) drivers in the US! Right before Thanksgiving! Did I mention it was also raining?

Thanks to Kathy, we have a nice carry-bag for Willie that will double as a backpack for excursions.

The drive was long and mostly, boring. On I10 we did see the largest big rig truck ever: a 58-wheeler! Six eight-wheel axles on the trailers, plus two four-wheel axles and a two-wheel axle on the cab.

What did we do before smart phones? At my fingertips are maps, gas prices, and directions to anywhere!

Because of the late start it was dark when we arrived at the Queen Mary, our hotel for the night before the cruise. It is not your usual hotel where you drive up to the front door. No, we had to park in the dark quite a way from the hotel in the midst of construction and dozens and dozens of tents for a big celebration over the Thanksgiving week. I had no idea what to do so called the hotel. It seems you somehow have to know that they have a golf cart to drive you from the parking lot to the hotel. So intuitive.

It was an experience staying in the Queen Mary! No heat unless you ask for a portable space heater. No A/C unless you ask for a fan, so no A/C. Our room is unremarkable, port holes open, very old-fashioned bathroom. So many things I’m accustomed to in normal hotels: reasonably priced meals (what we get for a free breakfast in many hotels cost us $28 each: overcooked scrambled eggs, rubbery bacon, you get the idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we stayed here, but would not go back.

The next morning, we had a seamless transfer of our bags to the ship, parked (does a ship park? OK, OK, they dock!) right behind the Queen Mary, via the bellman and his golf cart. Not so seamless was the transfer of us to the rental car return and then getting a ride to the ship and the seemingly endless walk from our Uber to the actual ship. By about 1pm I had more than 5000 steps counted on my pedometer.

I’ll write more about the ship on my next post. Sorry not to have any photos, perhaps by then I’ll be able to get access to Google Photos! Or I'll use my trusty Nikon rather than my phone!

Only two more sleeps!...

November 24, 2024

Two more sleeps! Our good friend, Melinda, introduced us to the concept of “how many nights (sleeps) until we leave?” It is so great and so easy for appreciating just how much time is left until our getaway. So, two more sleeps means we don’t have much time. We’re doing things for the last time before we leave. We had the last zoom call with our son and DIL in Australia (also known as OZ) yesterday (there won’t be enough bandwidth/speed on our cruise ship’s (Seabourn Quest) internet connection for zoom calls so the next time we’ll probably see them or our daughter and SIL will be when we get to Australia in about 48 sleeps!

My life is checklists. Like the old saying, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached, I have to have checklists to remember what to bring and what we’re doing, especially for a trip as long as this one. Not the longest we’ve done, that was probably our ‘Round the World cruise and trip to OZ in 2012 or our trains/planes/automobiles trip to OZ in 2008. Both were about 3 months+. So, checklists are my necessity.

Randy and I had a bit of a discussion about “Willie.” You may remember that Willie is the stuffed bear in a San Francisco Giants baseball uniform that I want to take with us. Randy thinks he will be too much trouble and we should just take a photo of Willie and take that with us. He will be a lot of (Randy’s words) or some (my words) trouble, but I think the fun we can have makes it worthwhile. We can take photos of him doing fun things on the ship or on excursions off the ship. We did the same thing with Cubby Bear (as in, Chicago Cubs bear) when we went on our Baseball Trip (a game in each of the MLB stadiums in 2015—we’re thinking about doing it again).

He even has my blog address on his uniform and my Instagram page (I have GOT to learn to do more with Instagram)! You can’t see it in these photos, but he has a glove and ball and a bat in addition to the uniform. The SF Giants are our favorite team!

So, back to packing for our departure after two more sleeps!

Trying to plan to pack...

November 19, 2024

One week to go! We leave next Tuesday, driving to Long Beach, staying at (Aside: does one stay AT a hotel or IN a hotel?) the Queen Mary which is docked (Another aside: How can a hotel be docked?) next to where we hope the Seabourn Quest will be docked.

We have cleared the bed in our junk room, uh, guest bedroom so we can start laying out our clothes for the trip. Quite hard to plan for clothing where it’s going to be warm to very hot (South Pacific and Australia’s summer) when it is cool to very cold here in Tucson! Now to actually taking out the clothes and trying some of them on. It is kind of exciting, though, to be getting ready for the kind of trip that most people will never take. Nevermind that most people do not want to be on a cruise ship for 46 days! We, on the other hand, have never been on a cruise that was too long (our longest, so far!, was a 104 day, around-the-world, cruise from Sydney to Sydney. Can you tell we like Australia and Australians?).

I am having to mix in dinner dates with friends here at the Hacienda, volunteer work, packing, making checklists, doctor appointments, and best of all, our daughter, Kathy’s, birthday on November 20. No, I won’t tell you how old she is. Then you’d know how old I am.

We were going to do an early Thanksgiving with Kathy and Ken (favorite SIL), but Ken will be away for this coming weekend so that’s not going to work. We will be away on the cruise for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Randy’s birthday! We chose this cruise despite missing the holidays but it was a tough decision. We chose it primarily because we haven’t see our son, Greg, and favorite DIL, Yolanda, in several years because they live in Australia. We do a zoom call about once a week to keep in touch, but it isn’t the same as being there!

So, back to packing. Or planning to pack. Or trying to plan to pack.

I promise to have more pictures when we actually get going!

Two weeks from today!...

 

November 12, 2024

It starts to feel real when there are just 14 sleeps to go.

I am now in the “planning” mode. Well, maybe I should capitalize and bold print that: PLANNING MODE! There are checklists, checklists of my checklists, just plain lists, lists I put on Evernote (my electronic note program that I cannot live without), lists I should put next to my bed, and lists I haven’t even created yet!

Today is about the last day I can order anything online (except Amazon, of course) and be sure it will arrive. So, I’ve ordered a couple of very light wraps that I can use to dress up my evening clothes. Don’t get the idea that Randy and I will dress up, mostly we won’t, but having a “wrap” is a nice way to change what I look like without actually changing my clothes.

We are looking through the refrigerator to see what we absolutely HAVE to eat, what we can foist off (don’t read that, Kathy!) on our daughter and SIL, and what we can freeze for when we get back.

I have created a spreadsheet of excursions we can go on (and what they cost!) and Randy and I have done a bit of thinking what we want to go ahead and schedule and what we want to wait to schedule. We have scheduled a meetup with a couple of retired pilots who live on Kona. It will be nice to see an old, friendly face after we spend seven days at sea! I’m sure we’ll meet lots of really nice people on board, although there are only 450 of us on this fairly small ship (Seabourn Quest, so you don’t have to look back to see what we’re sailing on).

Our ship is sold out (to Sydney, but not to Auckland); I have “met” a few people on facebook and on cruisecritic.com and I hope I or somebody will organize a “get together” at The Club (a meeting spot on the ship where Trivia is also held—more on Trivia in a bit).

The arrows above show where our cabin is (626) and where The Club is (Sorry it's not clearer, you can see it online at https://www.seabourn.com/content/dam/sbn/inventory-assets/ships/ada-deckplans/SBN_SO_QU_Deckplans_083024.pdf). The Club is an important meeting place for a drink, play some cards, just mingle, and—drum roll, please!—Trivia! We really enjoyed Trivia (important enough to enough people that it is always with a capital letter!) on our last cruise. But this is a crossing of the ocean with lots of sea days so I think Trivia will be CROWDED! Another Seabourn ship, crossing the Atlantic now, had 170 people turn up for Trivia! We shall see what happens on our ship.

On to more pressing things here at home. Have to get my needlepoint organized for the trip!