I haven’t travel blogged in a while so I thought I might give it a go again. We will see if I still want to make the effort each night 🙂

I’m going cruising

Not on my own boat or anything close to it but on a genuine cruise. On this boat. In these cabins (not the balcony ones)…

I had never anticipated going on a cruise. It really is the antithesis of what I look for in a holiday. The only thing L and I have ever considered was a transatlantic cruise on Cunard and that was mostly a romantic tip of the hat to the modernist period.

But I had been thinking it would be fun to spend some time with my mom and frankly I miss the old days of having her to myself when my brothers were of doing stuff. (The benefits of being the youngest 🙂 )

But short term travel is so expensive these days between meals and hotels and it kept adding up. Add to that we’d need some thing to do and I wasn’t sure a walking holiday like Banff or even Calgary was quite the thing. Then it occurred to me there were these short cruises… A little googling found a 3 day repositioning cruise from Vancouver to San Francisco with no stops… and dirt cheap ( ~$500 each with separate cabins and everything included. Perfect!

(I had figured hotels at ~$150/night pp with another ~$100/day pp for nice meals so that added up to closer to $900 pp. No entertainment included so that would add in some extra change as well.)

Booking

So.  I called my cousin Anita who has been a travel agent  (and owner) forever and whose services I had never availed myself of.

kaleidoscopetravel.ca

And explained the proposition and left it to her. All in all an enjoyable experience although I will say I ended up being less organized than usually because someone else was taking care of things. Which actually increased the “worry” because you had to trust someone else and ended up double checking everything. I know. I’m weird.

The Cruise

So I fly out in the morning and meet my mom in Calgary and then we fly on to Vancouver. We have half a day to get to the ship (the Crown Princess) so that will be fine. Then it’s 2 full days of floating around until we arrive in San Francisco at 7am on Sunday.

The we catch a flight back and are snug in our own beds on Sunday night ready to start the next work week.

A few costs

So the cruise is cheap. The flights about half again. But man oh man do they ever ding you for insurance if you are older than the average bear. Insurance was almost the same as the flights!

I also added in the “plus” package which took care 0f internet, drinks and gratuities as well as a few other perks. As long as we have 2 drinks a day we will come out ahead. But that was a hefty $250 pp. Still I hope this means other than cabs everything else is paid for in advance and it shouldn’t cost an extra penny.

Hopefully I will post some pictures as we go…