We are only 8 days away from heading to Fort Lauderdale and 6 or 7 days until 'packing day'.  Most of the World Cruise passengers will have their luggage picked up tomorrow; it's one of the early booking benefits along with pre-paid gratuities, nice large on-board credits and a bunch of other stuff that we don't get as hosts.

I started reading through my blog-book of our last world cruise and it brought back so many great memories! If you are curious, you can still read the blog here: http://luxcruisetravel.blogspot.com/   We will be returning to some of the same ports, but there are many new ones on this cruise that I'm really looking forward to.

It's Christmas Eve Eve... and almost time for the Bronco game so this will be a quick update.  I'm feeling very relieved; I have everything taken care of for all my booked clients and made a few new bookings too.  Now maybe I can do a little something about getting us ready to go.  My office will only be open 3 days between now and January 4th when we leave so everything will get done. 

We aren't doing anything special for Christmas this year; we decided to call the cruise our Christmas presents.  Wienie that I am, for New Year's eve I'll go outside on our front balcony and watch the early fireworks at 9:00 from downtown Denver and probably call it a night.

I forget that some of you probably haven't followed our trip blogs before so here's a little bit about us.  We are Sue and Jim from Denver, Colorado. We are in our low 60's (some days I feel like 110 and others like 35).  I'm retired from state government and have owned Luxury Cruise & Travel here in Denver for almost 10 years. Jim is retired but I often put him to work doing the 'grunt work' for the business... running errands, stamping brochures (all the stuff I hate!).

I haven't forgotten this blog, I've just been busy trying to get everything organized for the trip.  I have to have all of my business ready to be handled by the travel agent that is covering for me, Raye Hayden of Triple R Travel. I am so greatful to have this great agent take over for me while I'm gone; it's such a relief to know all my clients will have great service.

I haven't received the host package yet from Ensemble, but I've been getting other things ready like the invites for luncheons with all our passengers and other little goodies we will share with them.

We have one suitcase open on the floor in the bedroom and are tossing the extra stuff in there - the little odds and ends you don't want to forget for a really long cruise in the midst of packing the clothes and more normal cruise stuff.

My hobby is quilting and I haven't wanted to start a new project before we leave so I've been making Zendoodles. It's a lot of fun.

One Month Away

     We were asked to be the Ensemble Travel Group Hosts for this cruise 2 weeks ago just before we were leaving with a small group to do a Mississippi River cruise on the American Queen.  They had a host cancel at the last minute and I wasn't about to let the chance for another world cruise go by so we are now in the big crunch to get everything organized in one month.  Since we have previously done a world cruise and some other long voyages before I think we will get it all done; luckily we already had a valid visa for Brazil so we didn't have to go through that long process.

I'll try to post a couple more times before we actually depart for the trip and then I hope to post almost daily (depending on how nice the internet gods are onboard the ship).