Where In the World Are Tom and Jet

My wife and I are going to be on the first 63 days of the 2018 HAL Grand World Voyage on the Amsterdam (Ft. Lauderdale to Hong Kong). We have been avid cruisers for the past 39 years but this will be the longest cruise we’ve ever done, 2 weeks being our longest so far, and only our second cruise with HAL, the last being on the Rotterdam in 1986.

It’s been almost 18 months since we booked this cruise and it’s hard to believe that we’re less than a week away from starting our adventure.

A little about us: Jet (short for Jeanette) is a retired office manager and optometric assistant and has been writing novels, short stories and poetry for the past several years, many of which are published as ebooks on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. She also runs a blog for writers at http://www.cavalcadeofstars.Wordpress.com

I just retired from active practice as an optometrist after 40 years but also do consulting work for doctors on correct billing, coding and record keeping as well as lecturing on those topics. (I know, pretty boring stuff, but it gives me something to do)

Preparing for this cruise has been a pretty extensive process. Some of the things I changed and did over the past year were:

1) Switching all of our bills for the house, insurance and credit cards to on line payments.

2) paying attention to how much we use in the way of shampoos, tooth paste etc over time so we knew how much of that stuff to take with us.

3) Communicating with independent tour operators all of the world to set up tours for our ports. This involved lots of time on Tripadvisor and other travel websites, including Cruise Critic, and participating on the roll call for this cruise to find the best tours available at reasonable prices. HAL has excellent tours as well but in many cases they cost twice as much as the private tours and don’t allow us the flexibility to modify the Tours as the private tours do. I also read blogs that several people did about the 2017 World Cruise.

4) I spent lots of time figuring out what we need to take in the way of electronics both for communication and for pictures and other projects we’ll be working on during sea days and other down time. I’m sure the TSA folks will have a ball with me when we go through security next week 😱. Thank God for TSA Precheck which I’m hoping will make that process go smoothly.

5) Figuring our what we need to take for medications in case we come down with a cold or other malady along with getting our health insurance to allow us to get enough of our daily prescription meds with us (that has been a little bit of a challenge so, if you do something like this, don’t wait until the last minute!) We also updates our shots for pneumonia, flu, shingles and tetanus. I also did a hepatitis A series. We didn’t need any inoculations to visit any of the countries we’re going to but the folks taking the last half of the cruise after we leave needed specific inoculations as well as malaria medications for stops in Africa.

6) Deciding what clothes to take for us and figuring out ways to get them cleaned as we progress on the trip over the 9+ weeks we’re away. Luckily, this cruise is basically a warm weather cruise and we only have to take clothes for one season.

So, as you can see, it’s been a good bit of work to plan for this trip. Now it’s just a matter of depending on the airline to get us to Ft. Lauderdale safely with our luggage next Wednesday and boarding the ship on Thursday.

You’re welcome to follow along on our grand adventure. I probably won’t post again until we leave in a few days and I hope to post often, hopefully with some pictures, as we sail on our itinerary.

If you have any questions, post them here and I’ll try to answer them as best I can. Thanks for following along.

Looking forward to your posts and following along.

Bon Voyage :)

Great start. Will look forward to your posts!

Thanks for taking the time to add your voice: always great to hear the play-by-play.

Wow! So many are going on these long cruises-I'll be following along on yours and looking forward to reading all about it. Enjoy!

Safe travels to you! I love following along with the live threads from the longer cruises. It sure helps pass the time until our next trip! Thank you!

Ttt

Safe travels! I will look forward to your posts!

Can't wait to read about your adventures!!

Look forward to your posts. Bon Voyage!

Thank you for taking us along on your travels.

Wishing you a fabulous cruise.

Thanks so much for sharing.....those of us "forced" to be arm-chair cruisers right now will happily be following along.....:)

Bon Voyage.

Many years when we started to take longer cruises, I set up a special checking account to have our bills automatically paid each month. Just have to make certain the account has enough money in it to cover the time we would be gone. No worries about Internet.

Bon Voyage and will be following your posts.

Keith

Will be interested in reading your posts. How will we be able to locate your posts? Will they automatically show up on CC or is there another blog site? Noticed this might be a new CC thread. Thanks.

Especially interested in the views of a first time world cruiser. Following.

Roy

I'll be interested in following along as you report on your longest cruise to date. Wishing you a great voyage, good times, and meeting up with interesting people to share this adventure with.

https://optometricbilling.com/tricare-eyemed/

For those of you who want to follow the posts, here is the link for it. You can click on this and then bookmark it as one of your favorites. Also, you can click on the Thread Tools button at the top of the page and receive emails when something new is posted.

Thanks for following along as we get ready to start our journey in a few days.

Looking forward to reading about your adventure. Hope to be there for your sail away. Enjoy. Bon Voyage.

Allan

Well, it’s packing day! Stuff is spread out in various rooms around the house that somehow now need to be fit into one large suitcase and two carry ons along with our “personal” item allowed by the airline.

We already shipped one bag ahead with most of our shampoos and other toilet articles because I was afraid that if we tried to check that bag with all of its liquids that TSA would rifle through it and we’d be missing something we really needed.

I looked at all of our stuff yesterday and told Jet we needed another suitcase. However, she’s the master packer and is confident she can make it work.

We’ll see. Fingers crossed!

Have a wonderful time. Bon Voyage!

Terri

Lucky for us we live in Fort Lauderdale. All we will have to do is load it into the UHaul. :'):'):') Probably brought way too much stuff, but we might be able to be an extra resource for too much "supplies"

Lanny and Jim

Have a wonderful voyage - looking forward to reading your posts/

Well, my miracle packer did it! Got everything into one large and two carry on bags. Large bag is exactly 50 pounds.

Now the question is how are the TSA guys going to react when they get to my electronics bad? Three laptops, including one for work plus two,iPads. Plus all the cables and hard drives and my camera. Hope they don’t want to weigh it because it may weigh more than the big bag :D

Just hope the projected snow for to,Oreos holds off until we get out of her in the morning on our flight to Florida.

I tried to follow the link to your blog, but maybe the link is wrong? Thanks for posting this thread, I'm looking forward to following along. Safe travels and have a great time!

Will be interested in reading your posts. How will we be able to locate your posts? Will they automatically show up on CC or is there another blog site? Noticed this might be a new CC thread. Thanks.

Click on Thread Tools above, choose subscribe to this thread, choose daily updates by email, and this thread will be in your email each day that has new posts.

I'm subscribed, looking forward to updates.