As I sit here and drink my morning coffee out of one of my favorite Starbucks, I am having so much trouble taming the travel bug inside me. I love the I can reminisce about our past travel destinations with something as simple as a coffee cup.
Travel feeds my soul.
I have a couple side hustles coming up that will help get me out of town for a few days. Mostly, I have been all over the place with indecisiveness as we wait for the cruise industry to start back up and what we want to do with our existing cruise bookings. I thought I was okay with pushing our October cruise out and waiting until March 2022 as we hope to go on our NCL cruise to Australia and New Zealand. I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of following a group of cruisers on Instagram in the UK who recently completed a four-day cruise on MSC in/out of Southhampton, London. Now the cruise desire is light up like a roadside flair and I just really want to get back on a cruise ship!
As luck would have it, we had not yet cancelled our October NCL cruise down the coast of the Pacific North West when we received the “official” word the cruise company had to cancel it. The plan right now is to use as much of the fleet as possible to cruise to destinations that do not use a US port (Rome, Italy, Jamaica, and Dominican Republic) and to also start back up in Hawaii and Alaska. This is why we were canceled. Our ship needed to be used on an different itinerary. We were gifted a 10% coupon towards our next booking, which I thought would be a 14-day Europe cruise in 2023. The coupon was only good on sailings through 2022.
We spent some time looking at options in October and spotted an Alaksa Cruise with a good price tag and perfect flight options to get us to the port on the same day of embarkation and a flight home the same day as disembarkation. And….the flights were just $58 each way or 2,500 Southwest rewards points. That is a KILLER deal. It didn’t take long to make the decision we would be calling our cruise guy and booking an Alaska cruise in October of 2021.
The icing on the cake is that Mom and Dad will be joining us. I am over the moon my parents are going to travel with us. I think this makes me 100x more exciting for October to get here (but not too fast because I am ready for warm temps).
This is a modified cruising itinerary from our previous Alaska cruise with less port stops and it does not cruise the inside passage. I hope it will still be enjoyable for my parents as they have been wanting to return to Alaska for many years. I also hope it doesn’t get cancelled! We will have three ports of call: Juneau, Icy Straight Point, and Ketchikan. We will be on the NCL Bliss, which has a brewery and a Starbucks as well as some entertainment that my parents will enjoy. I am really living on cloud nine right now. My parents are the best so we are going to have a great time.
We currently still hold our other cruise booking for March 2022 and we are staying hopeful that Australia and New Zealand will start accept travels again without a 14-day quarantine. All we can do is sit and wait and hope for the best.
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