Trip Planning

Stephanie and I are currently planning the details of our cruise, mainly what we want to see and do in each Port of Call. The purpose of this cruise is to celebrate our Birthdays, both of which are in April. This cruise will be for my 50th Birthday Celebration, and will be for Stephanie’s …..(well I will be nice and not state which birthday this is for her!!) XX Birthday. We will celebrate Stephanie’s on the actual day, April 15th, during one of our day’s at sea crossing the Atlantic. We will pick a “belated” date to celebrate my birthday, since it occurs on the 6th, prior to our departure date on the 10th.

The cruise is a 15 day Transatlantic cruise, with Ports of Call in Bermuda, Scotland, Ireland (2), Great Britain (2) and France, ending up in Southampton, UK. The original plan was to then travel to London by train, and spend two additional nights in London before departing on our flight back to Jacksonville.

Although the cruise “officially” ends in Southampton, UK, we now plan on leaving the ship a day earlier, at the port of Le Havre, France. We will travel from Le Havre to Paris by train, and spend the night in a Paris hotel. This will allow us to avoid the 2.5 hour return trip to the ship in Le Havre, and giving us a few more hours to see Paris, and especially to see Paris at night. We will leave Paris on Saturday afternoon, April 25, and take the “Chunnel” Train to London. Once there, we will spend two nights in London, per the original plan, and depart Gatwick Airport on Monday, April 27 for the flight home.

We start the trip with a drive in a rental car to Ft. Lauderdale early on the morning of Friday, April 10, 2009.

Well, off to do more planning for the trip…….

Stephanie and I will be off on our trip two weeks from tomorrow. We are getting ready, putting packing lists together, trying to minimize the clothes we want to take, and continuing to read about our destinations. Yesterday we finalized our plans for the stop in Falmouth, UK. Planning our activities for Dublin, Ireland is already finished, as is Bermuda.

Well, its official, Princess is going to let us off the ship a day early in Le Havre, France. We had not planned on seeking permission, but after reading a few more cruise forum postings, we realized that it would be better to get official approval ahead of time. We contacted Princess and Travelocity, and found out how to process the request. Since we booked through Travelocity, they had to make the official request through the Princess “Dispatch Department”. Within a few hours, our information on the Princess Web Site indicated our Disembarkation point as Le Havre, France instead of Southampton, UK. Now we just have to make sure all is set once we actually are on the ship, and can make sure the arrangements fit our plans in person.

We have completed most all of our planning for the ports, at least in so far as making sure we have all of the information with us to make the final choices. For a couple of ports of call, we have “options”, mainly so we can have alternate plans in case of bad weather. We are trying to avoid having to use our free ship board Internet time for port planning, it is both slow, and tedious to try and accomplish much through that service.

Since we have a lot of days at sea before we arrive in the British Isles, we will utilize that time to finish reading our Rick Steves’ guide books and make our final choices.

We start the fun process of packing this week, mainly trying to eliminate the “extra” items and pack as lightly as we can. Nothing worse than lugging unused items around on a train as we travel at the end of the cruise in Paris and London.