Tomorrow morning I will be setting off on yet another major holiday. Ain't retirement grand?
A lot of this trip covers familiar ground: London, England for starters. I haven't written here about that magnificent city yet but I have certainly covered the nuts and bolts of getting there. Rome -- well, I haven't blogged yet about Rome either, but that was actually the destination of one of my earliest overseas trips, way back when I was in high school. That, by the way, was during the Old Stone Age (or in 1971 for those who prefer precise scientific dating of events). I don't recall too much of that trip, but I certainly look forward to seeing some of the same sights and a few new ones.
The centrepiece of this trip is another, and longer cruise. It's even on the same ship I sailed on in Tahiti back in January and February (you can read about Ocean Princess here: At Sea in Polynesia).
Here's a better picture of the ship than the ones I used before:
Princess Cruises photo
Welcome to the world of the "positioning cruise". This name describes a one-way, trans-oceanic voyage to move a cruise ship from one popular cruising area to another, usually seasonally. This is the season when many cruise ships are doing positioning cruises from various ports in Europe to various ports in North America. Here's the route plan for mine:
One glance at the map tells you right away that a positioning cruise is going to be a lot longer than most regular cruises, with more at-sea days than days in ports. If that's okay with you, then these cruises can be remarkable bargains. In this case, I've moved up from the balcony stateroom I had last cruise to a balcony mini-suite which is 50% bigger, and I'm paying over $100 a day less for it! I'd be saving more like $300 dollars a day if I had booked the same cabin as last time. That's a pretty typical comparison.
And there are seven en route ports -- that certainly isn't "no stops", which is the image some people have of positioning cruises. Indeed a cruise is by far the cheapest way of incorporating all these ports into a single trip. Consider: to fly from Gibraltar to Madeira, you would have to travel by way of London, since that is the closest airport with service to both locations. That would involve close to 7 hours of flying. Or, let's say, to get from Madeira to Bermuda you would again have to fly northeast to London, and then southwest again over the Atlantic. The cost would be considerable, to put it mildly -- and that trip would have you in the air for over 12 hours.
Indeed, it was the inclusion of both Gibraltar and Madeira that first caught my eye about this cruise. My parents travelled to both those places on different trips many years ago, and I've had both on my bucket list ever since. Now I can kill two birds with one stone! Bonus!
As well, there's the stop at Sete. I'll save the importance of that one for later, but that's a piece of unfinished business dating right back to about my 9th or 10th birthday. So I'm going to strike several items off my list all at one go!
And then there's Bermuda. Dear, beautiful, rainbow-coloured Bermuda, which I have loved like another home ever since my first trip there in 1967 -- and which I have visited more often than any other location off the North American continent. But this will be the first time ever that I haven't arrived in Bermuda by air.
All of this is going to be great fun, and a great learning experience as well. But first there are my two en route stopovers: London and Rome. We'll get to London right away in the next post, as soon as I climb off that marvellous jet-lag-saving daylight flight from Toronto.
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