Final Payment Made

So, we are now within 90 days of departure and final payment was made last week. Whew! We are starting to make serious preparations for being gone for 4 months. Debbie has already scheduled the complimentary IPS luggage pickup for 12/19/2005. Though when asked to describe the number, weight and size of the bags, she had to confess that she had not actually started packing yet!

We have booked and paid for 2 overland trips. One to the Taj Mahal for an overnight and a 2-nighter to Cambodia. The Cambodia trip departs from Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam on the 2nd day there and visits Phnom Penh and Siem Reap for Angkor Wat and then we meet back up with the RSSC folks in Bangkok for the hotel overnight there that is included in the cruise fare. We had purchased CSA trip insurance that we found online at www.insuremytrip.com back in January when we booked. Debbie last week had the policy coverage upped by $6980 to cover these excursions that had to be paid at final payment and are non-refundable at 60 days from departure, so next month. (Note: insuremytrip.com will not sell a policy over $100,000 total over the Internet, but it is easy enough to shop for a policy there at that maximum to make your choices and then call the 800 number to purchase the policy for the actual amount.)

Between the time of initial deposit and final payment, Debbie's father has completely lost the use of both his arms and legs from ALS. Her Grandfather had his 90th birthday yesterday and he and her Grandmother have had some declines as well during the last 8 months. Debbie has spent some extra time down in Florida during this period to try to help her Mom out with all of them, but not a lot that can be done except being there fulltime to lend a hand when needed and that is just not really possible for her. Debbie's family has continued to insist that we not let them interfere with our big trip plans, but it is hard. Clay's view is that we should do this while we can because you never know when it will be our turn to be disabled. Since Clay is a decade older than Debbie, she agrees that if he feels that way and now is his time, OK.

In any event, we are both committed to making the big full circle of the planet now and are making preparations to be out of the country and on the move for 4 months. We are fairly well prepared for this from our experiences with the round-the-world trip of 2001, the only difference being that this is for about twice as long and will cover tax time.  

It is getting closer and feels much more real now!

Finished RSSC Diamond Qualifying Cruise

You will find an exhaustive trip journal for the mini-cruise that we had to take to be past RSSC passengers and qualify for discounts on the World Cruise at http://rsscdiamondsanjuanrt22005.blogspot.com/

Highlights of 2001 Easterly World Circumnavigation

2001 Highlights

Click the link above for photos.

Our favorite day of 2001's eastward circumnavigation

Debbie holding Little Bob, our mascot, with Jackass Penguins on Boulders Beach, outside Simonstown, south of Cape Town, South Africa in November 2001. A very good day.

Prelude

Above is our World Cruise route map minus the Western Hemisphere and the beginning Panama Canal segment!

Prelude to a Circumnavigation Cruise on RSSC Voyager 2005-2006

We started researching this trip a few years ago. Here is some background on that. Debbie had a personal goal in 2001 of circumnavigating the globe in the first year of the new millennium. We started planning and saving for that trip in 1999 and then September 11, 2001 happened. All our plans started to unravel, airlines and cruiselines shut down, then Clay was laid off from his job. We tried to cobble our dream trip back together piece by piece, but it was not looking good, everyday it seemed as if there were another stumbling block to be overcome. We were originally supposed to leave home to start this journey on the 25th of October and that turned out to be 2 days before the end of Clay’s employment as well. We had to do some serious reevaluation. After a few days of thinking, we decided that we would not celebrate the first year of the new millennium by being victims. With Clay unemployed, we could be gone a lot longer than we had originally planned and we decided to make the most of it. We cancelled everything that had been previously booked and rebooked and Debbie found a long cruise that had been newly rerouted and was sailing nearly empty leaving Barcelona at the end of October and sailing around Africa to end in Singapore. We booked everything through one TA (thanks Jan Fishbein) and Orient Lines and took a 52-day trip traveling eastward around the globe by air and sea. We flew Business Class air roundtrip and got a penthouse cabin. We cruised for 45 days on the Crown Odyssey with about 300 other hardy, adventurous souls. It might have been a crazy decision. We lost some money on the first trip unraveling after 9/11 and we spent about 4 times more money on the replacement trip than the original trip had cost, but we never regretted doing it for an instant, then or since.

It turned out that what Debbie thought was fulfilling a goal only created a monster in Clay. Clay now felt that only a complete surface circumnavigation would be the proper way to do such a thing and that he liked long cruises and that he did not want to travel east again. We started looking and liked the sound of RSSC. We tracked the first Voyager World Cruise from the first public word of it in March 2004. Our 20th anniversary is in May of 2005 and we thought we could use that as an excuse to take the next Voyager World Cruise if there was one. We thought we would have until March 2005 to make a decision, but Debbie was keeping a keen eye on things and saw posted on Cruise Critic on 12/30/04 that RSSC had a schedule out for the next WC already. Clay checked at work that day and found that he would be allowed 3-4 months off at the beginning of 2006. (He had taken limited leave for 2004 and was willing to do so again for 2005 to bank the time off for this trip.) Ngaire posted the next Voyager World Cruise on http://www.brownandkeenetravel.com on January 1, 2005! It traveled westward again through both canals and since it did not leave Ft. Lauderdale until after Christmas this time we could be on the entire circumnavigation without disrupting family plans. We emailed her that day and by January 3 had booked the Diamond 2/2/05 4-night San Juan-San Juan cruise to qualify for past passenger discounts for the WC. We got our names on a waitlist for the WC. On January 24, we put down our 20% deposit to hold cabin 748. Even being so early to book, we did not get the G cabin that we first requested. So, the lesson here, readers, is that you cannot start planning something like this too soon. Of course, the lesson from the paragraph above is that you should wait until the last minute and then find what you need. So, who knows?