We can hardly believe that after countless months of planning, our wonderful journey begins tomorrow morning when we are picked up at our home and driven to the airport for our flight to Los Angeles, California. From there we will be driven over to Beverly Hills where we will stay until we board the Crystal Serenity.
We do think of this trip as a journey due to its considerable length, along with the variety and sheer number of ports-of-call that we will visit. A world cruise is unlike any other cruise that we have previously taken. In addition to visiting so many interesting areas of the world, a world cruise provides a very unique opportunity to develop long lasting relationships with fellow passengers and members of the crew. Overtime, the ship becomes more like a community or even a small town.
We have read a good deal about most of the places we will visit during the course of this journey in order to determine our plans for each port of call. Several months ago we signed up for a variety of shore excursions offered by Crystal Cruises which we plan to take during this journey. Recently, we made a few minor changes to these reservations, mostly through the addition of a few more excursions. By reserving the excursions ahead of time we avoid the necessity of filling out and turning in shore excursion forms once on board the ship. In addition, this assures our place on the very popular tours that sometimes sell out prior to the voyage. Once on board the ship, we may fine-tune this list further by changing a few of the excursions as we learn more about the tours from the Crystal Cruises Shore Excursion Department. We likely will add a few private excursions offered through Crystal after consulting with the shore excursion staff. These private excursions are coordinated through the same tour providers which are used by Crystal for the group tours. As such, we are assured that they meet Crystal’s standards for security, safety, and overall quality, and in the unlikely event that we are delayed getting back to the vessel for any reason, we know that the ship will wait for us as they would for any of the group shore excursions booked through Crystal. We also reserved two Crystal sponsored overland packages as the overland tours require booking prior to the sailing. This includes spending one night in Bangkok, Thailand and spending one evening in Egypt as part of a two day excursion of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings.
At the same time, there are various ports of call that we plan to see on our own. Typically, these are places where we will walk around the town by ourselves or with a few of our fellow passengers. Sometimes we like to do simple things such as visit schools/universities, places of worship, and/or museums. We also like to locate food markets where the locals tend to shop in order to get a sense of the type and variety of foods that are part of the local diet and culture for a particular region of the world we are visiting. We also enjoy getting good exercise by taking some very long walks in town while we observe all of the beautiful scenery that surrounds us.
We have taken care of all passport/visa related items. Early in the summer, we had additional pages added to each of our passports as we were advised that we should have a total of 24 blank pages available per passport. We needed to obtain visas prior to the cruise for India, Vietnam and Australia. We used the visa service that is recommended by Crystal for India and Vietnam and we had our passports and visas back in our hands by early November. We were advised by the visa service to obtain the Australia visa, which they call an Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) via an on line service provided by the Australian Department of Immigration. While we are on board the ship, Crystal will obtain visas for us for the countries of Oman, Egypt, and Myanmar. For Myanmar, we were provided with visa applications and landing forms with our final cruise documents and asked to fill them out ahead of time so they can be turned-in at the time we board the ship in Los Angeles.
Speaking of final cruise documents, these arrived in early December and provided additional information regarding the voyage. Along with the final documents we received other items such as cruise tickets, flight information and luggage tags. We have also received other correspondence from Crystal about various activities that will occur during the course of the voyage.
As was the case with last year’s adventure, we have devoted a good deal of time and effort preparing for this trip. Once again, we made several comprehensive lists to help keep us organized. These included various “things to do lists” along with a listing of each and every item we plan to take with us. This not only helps to ensure that we do not forget anything at home; it also helps to minimize taking unnecessary items with us. We also have a complete list, by suitcase, which notes each and every item that we packed. All of our knowledge from last year’s journey has been instrumental as we determined what items we needed to take with us this time around. The major change from last year’s voyage relates to the climate for some of the places that we will visit this year. Unlike last year when we needed to take a fair amount of cold weather clothing for selected locations such as Antarctica, and the Southern region of South America where it can get quite chilly and windy, this year we did not need to pack this type of clothing. Instead, we needed to take additional lightweight clothing, anticipating warm-to-hot weather in several locations including the Pacific Ocean Islands and Southeast Asia.
While we did our best to optimize the amount of items that we are taking with us, we are still taking quite a lot of items with us.
In the evening, the dress code on the ship varies from casual, to informal (essentially semi-formal), to formal attire. Including the World Cruise Gala the breakout of evening attire is 59 casual, 25 informal and 25 formal nights so a variety of outfits are required for each category of evening attire. Then add on top of this all of the clothing needed during the daytime, plus our daily workouts, and as you can imagine it adds up to quite a lot of luggage. We also enjoy dressing up in the evenings since, for us, each night is very special when we sail with Crystal whether we are eating in the main dining room or at one of the specialty restaurants on the ship.
As we did last year, we will keep the number of pieces of luggage that we are taking with us a secret, at least for now, except to say that it represents more suitcases than one would take for a typical cruise. All we can say is thank goodness that we will have assistance with our luggage from the moment we are picked up at our home to the time we embark the cruise ship and from the time we disembark the cruise ship until we are back at home. We are also fortunate that Crystal provides a sufficient credit towards the excess luggage fees charged by the airlines which should adequately cover most if not all of the charges that we incur.
Like last year, we decided to go ahead and pack the majority of our bags a few weeks ahead of time so that we could get a good sense of precisely how many bags we would take with us on this trip. This also allowed us to spend the past couple of weeks thinking through any last minute changes and getting everything else taken care at home.
Before we begin this journey, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks and sincere appreciation to both family and friends for all of the wonderful encouragement, and well wishes, you have given to us. We want to thank our travel specialist, Lynn Segal, for all of her help as we prepared for the World Cruise, and we also want to thank our wonderful next door neighbors for all that they do. We are also very appreciative and thankful for all of the assistance that various personnel from Crystal Cruises have provided to us over the past several months as we prepared for this journey.
Through this Blog we hope you will feel as though you are on this 108 day journey on board the Crystal Serenity with us along with our pre-cruise stay in Beverly Hills, California, and know that we will be thinking about each of you.
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Let the journey begin.
Keith & Anne Marie
