December 2008 - Pre Cruise Planning

A little over a month until our BIG anniversary cruise on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner. Before I get all bogged down with Christmas stuff, I decided to spend a little time working on my cruise blog so I'd have it down pat by the time our ship sets sail.

A little background about me/us: My wonderful hubby Mike and I have taken three previous cruises together -- all on Carnival, all to the Caribbean (He is very very predictable!). In addition, I have taken 4 others without him -- one as a child on the now-defunct Oceanic, one to Canada/New England with a group of friends, and two to the Bahamas with "just us girls". We have had 25 years of wedded bliss -- well, maybe not 25 years of BLISS, but definitely 25 years of WEDDEDNESS -- and we decided to do something really special to commemorate the occasion. Hence we're going to be like big shots (as Ralph Kramden would say) for a couple of weeks and see how the other half lives. The hardest part about the whole thing might be getting Mike out of town and away from our grandson for that long of a time!

I'm sure we're going to have an amazing time and I've been doing all kinds of research on the various ports we'll be visiting for the first time (some of them we've already visited). I'm not really an insane "must plan everything out in advance" kind of person....no matter what you might hear from everyone who knows me..... but I do like to have some sort of "direction" when I get up in the morning. Even on vacation. We're going to play golf on St. Kitt's, Aruba and Curacao. We're doing a snorkel catamaran party boat off Bonaire. And I have beach activities planned for St. Lucia and Grand Turk. San Juan is a gambling destination! Actually so is Aruba and it will be fun to see how much it's changed since we were last there over a dozen years ago.

I have more to say but I am going to try to post this now. Then I will see if I can edit it later or if not I will just do a Part Deux. It's a good experiment to see if I can edit a posted blog -- just in case I have to recant something. Also, I'm going to attempt to put a picture in here somewhere -- I think it might be my cabin or it might be the ship's pool at night -- it won't need a caption; if you can't figure out which it is you have bigger problems than can be solved by blog reading.

Oh, look, there it seems to be at the top of my paragraph....I guess my next lesson will be in learning how to put the pictures where EXACTLY I want them to be.