After months of planning, our wonderful journey begins tomorrow morning when we are picked up at home and driven to the airport for check-in for our flight to Miami, Florida.
As you can imagine, a great deal of planning has gone into the preparation for this trip. We made several comprehensive lists ahead of time to help keep us organized. This included listings for each and every item that we needed to take with us to not only ensure that we do not forget anything at home, but to also avoid taking unnecessary items with us. We also had our "things to do lists" to keep track of all items that we needed to take care of prior to this journey. Other items for the trip that needed to be taken care of ahead of time included obtaining visas for those countries where visas cannot be secured on board the ship, to receiving various recommended and required vaccinations (ouch), and selecting shore excursions that we wanted to reserve ahead of time.
There has been so much to pack for the World Cruise given not only the length of the voyage but also the overall itinerary. While primarily sailing in warm weather climates, we will also encounter much cooler weather as we sail south from Valparaiso, Chile and make our way around Cape Horn and Antarctica before heading back north towards Brazil. This has added to the amount and type of clothing that we are taking with us. Hopefully, we've been smart about what we packed.
In the evening, the dress on Crystal varies from casual, to informal (essentially semi-formal), to formal attire. Including the Miami Gala the breakout of evening attire is 58 casual, 27 informal and 25 formal nights. Then add to this all of the clothing needed for daytime activities and as you can imagine it adds up to a "boat load" of luggage.
We packed many of our bags a few weeks ago so that we could get a good sense of precisely how many bags we would take with us on this trip. This information also needed to be provided to Crystal so they could arrange for transportation from our home to the airport and from the Miami airport over to the Hotel where we will be staying prior to the cruise. Since that time we've added some final items to the luggage and now the bags are all packed. We will keep the number of bags we are taking a secret for now, but it's definitely greater than we originally anticipated for this trip. Of course, just think about the amount of toiletries, cosmetics, vitamins, and other related items needed for a trip of this duration and that adds up to almost one full suitcase just by itself. Also, due to limited closet space we are taking enough wire hangers to hang all our clothes since wire hangers take up significantly less space than the wooden hangers that are provided in the stateroom. Thank goodness once on board the ship, Crystal will store our empty luggage that we are unable to fit under the bed. And, we are fortunate that the amount of credit that Crystal will provide us for excess luggage will cover the cost that the airline will be charging us for exceeding the luggage allowance on both the outbound and return flights.
Recently, we received a very nice letter from the Crystal World Cruise Hostess which listed many of the special entertainers and lecturers who will be on board. In addition to the outside entertainers, Crystal has its very own entertainers who provide a wonderful range of evening entertainment including shows with music, singing and dancing. In terms of the lecturers there are many well known names and some less well known, but they cover pretty much the whole gambit of topics from health, to politics, to national and word-wide events, to sports, to theatre, to food and wine, to travel and to the specific destinations that we will visit during the course of the cruise. There are a couple of lecturers early on who we have had the pleasure of meeting several times on our last two Crystal Cruises. We are looking forward to not only attending their formal lectures, but spending time with each of them outside of these sessions. We will provide more details on all of this throughout the course of the cruise.
Before we begin this journey, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks and sincere appreciation to each of you for the wonderful encouragement, and advice that you have given to us about this trip.
We are ready to go, and we hope through this Blog that you will feel that you are on this journey with us.
Keith & Anne Marie
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