Blue Planet Journey

  People cruise (or choose to avoid cruses) for a variety of reasons. Caroline started cruising a lot because she started working on the ships! In 2018, before she retired due to the impacts of Covid-19 on the industry, she wrote  about her experience for a local newspaper: In 2017, I had the opportunity to check off a bucket list item by living and working on a luxury cruise liner for 14 weeks. This experience was thrilling, amazing and inspiring. In late July, I boarded the Celebrity Eclipse , a 2,800-passenger vessel sailing out of Southampton, England. I took care of dialysis patients, people who had lost kidney function and needed a machine to clean their blood and take off excess fluid. Dialysis at Sea, a company based in Florida, provided the equipment allowing dialysis patients to travel the world just like everyone else. I sailed on seven separate cruises, with itineraries that included Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Can...

Everyone has their coronavirus pandemic story for 2020, and this is mine. The uniqueness of it is that Caroline and I lived out of a suitcase, away from Utah, for at least half of it. Dancing and drumming at Nokomis Beach Park on January 1. The year started with us in Venice, Florida, visiting family and celebrating the New Year. We kayaked to Don Pedro Island State Park, rode bikes and ran along the beach in Manasota Key, danced at the drum circle at Nokomis Beach Park, toured a rum distillery, explored the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota,  and played with our grand kiddo. It was a great celebration, welcoming a new year of mystery, love, and adventure. Green sea turtle egg fragments on a Florida beach. We were honored to be trusted with transporting grand kiddo back to DC, and we were met by our number one daughter in the baggage area at National Airport. We spent the next 2 weeks being grandparents, walking with kiddo to the National Zoo to watch the marine mammals and the lions, go...

If you want to start a heated and vigorous debate in a cruising chat room or a ship's lounge, just bring up the issue of formal dress.  A recent article in the Washington Post noted how a query about relaxed dre ss codes on Facebook "...struck a nerve and sparked more than a few squabbles, differences of opinion and downright insults." I reposted the article on a Facebook group for Celebrity Captain's Club members (frequent travelers), and received similar reactions. So, I thought I would clarify the issue, so we could all be on the same page. Right... All of my cruises have been on Celebrity and Royal Caribbean (RC).  In January, I was on both the Celebrity  Edge and the RC  Allure of the Seas . The Edge is considered a "high end" ship (you can interpret this in many ways... more Captain's Club (like RC's Diamond) members, more expensive, many experienced cruisers, and an older/wealthier crowd).  The Allure clearly is a family-oriented ...