We have one week until we depart from home to drive to port St. Lucie, Fl., on our way to Fort Lauderdale the following day to board the Regal Princess. We have continued to refine our planning for the ports of call, and for our four night stay in Berlin, Germany after the cruise is completed.
We have not altered our plans for the port calls, just put some final touches on the details of what we want to try and see. The majority of the recent planning has been geared toward our time in Berlin, and making sure we have a plan in place on what we want to see there. There is always a lot of effort put into having directions to the various sights, and making sure we have an idea of where everything is located, and the best methods of getting there, usually via public transportation.
We have a list of sights we are planning to see in Berlin, but do not really have a schedule. We do know that we want to go to Potsdam on a nice weather day to see the palaces and grounds there, and with a lot of outside things to see there, we want the weather to be nice when we go. Some of the other sights we want to see in Berlin include the Brandenburg Gates, the remnants of the Berlin Wall, Museum Island, The Berlin Cathedral, and possibly some of the WWII museums.
We will begin our packing efforts tomorrow. We have purchased a 25 inch rolling duffle bag to take as a carry on bag onto the ship. This is a “disposable” bag just for the cruise. It will help us to avoid taking our large luggage into the hotel in Port St. Lucie just for the one night stay, and also enable us to pack our toiletries and a change of clothes to carry onto the ship so that we will have access to our bathing suits and sunscreen on Embarkation day while we wait for the large suitcases to be delivered to the cabin. We do not want to deal with this additional bag once we disembark in Hamburg, it will be too much trouble to handle on the trains and for our walk to the hotel in Berlin. We only paid $19.00 for the bag at Walmart, and we hope to find a passenger or crew member on the ship that may want an additional bag. We have done this once before on a Transatlantic cruise, and on that trip, we found two different passengers who needed the additional bags we had on that trip. One couple even bought us a bottle of wine for dinner, more than the value of the bag we gave them, but everyone was happy with the outcome.
We have already put travel notices in for our two sets of credit cards and ATM cards, so we are set on that front. We have about Euro 150.00 left over from our last trip to Europe, so we don’t need any Euros right away, but will probably try and get some in Ponta Delgada, Azores, our first European Union stop, just to make sure we have no issues with withdrawing money using our ATM cards later in the cruise and in Berlin.
We are certainly getting excited about the trip, and are looking forward to the relaxing sea days at the beginning of the cruise.