Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Grand Princess Sea Day

Hello from our last sea day of this cruise!

Well, the encouraging word money pockets made it to the Wake Show today. All seven of them were read aloud, and I found out that the dollars will be going to charity. Double score! I’m going to continue adding one each day to their comment box for this upcoming cruise as well.

Tomorrow we’ll be back in San Francisco and we will find a new bunch of cruisers showing up. There are only 20 of us in transit passengers staying on for the next voyage. I do believe that’s one of the smallest numbers we’ve seen. We originally were planning on heading home tomorrow, too. But when we realized that once we got home we’d have to shovel snow and get groceries and Christmas shop and wrap presents and put up our tree and then take it down two weeks later it all just didn’t seem worth the effort. We’re basically skipping the pre-Christmas junk this year. As long as we’re home for Christmas day (per our daughter’s orders) that’s all that matters.

As for blogging during this last cruise of the year, I think I’ll be skipping it. I’m calling it a Christmas present to myself. I spent way too much time this past year blogging live from the ships. It takes more time than you could imagine making sure I had experiences to share, searching out answers to readers’ questions, writing informative posts, and taking photos other cruisers would find of interest. While I loved every minute of it (well, most every minute of it) I’m desperately in need of a cruise where I can relax and enjoy it as a cruiser and not as a writer, reporter, blogger, or photographer. (Thanks, slow Grand Princess internet, for making that decision an easier one.)

However, if anything new or exciting comes up I’ll come back here and write about it. I will also do an end of the year wrap up sometime next week. I’ve already started on that post and let me just say this: Oh. My. Goodness. What a year of travel it was.

Just to give you an idea, here are the numbers I’ve figured so far:
11 cruises
7 different ships
90 nights at sea
12 flights
19 hotels
7 National Parks
2 NASCAR races
2 Major League Baseball games
3 road trips

Whew. Like I said, more to come on that in the next week.

Tomorrow we have San Francisco, then three sea days on our way back to Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Mazatlán, and Cabo San Lucas. Then two sea days, a day in San Francisco, then home to cold and snowy Boise, Idaho. As said in Frosty the Snowman...busy, busy, busy.

For me that’ll mean busy being a cruiser, not busy being a blogger. At least for 10 days. See you soon.