World Cruise

Seventeen days to go. The final paperwork is now in hand after my passport was returned from the Indian Consulate in San Francisco with Visa inside. It seems I now have permission to enter India for tourism for the next ten years (but only less than 180 days at a time). Australia was an e-visa and Jordan’s will be obtained while on the ship through Princess.

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It may seem odd to be writing about taxes in a blog devoted to a world cruise. But, when that cruise starts on 22 January and ends on 14 May you suddenly realize that you won’t be able to collect all the 1099s and other documents from the mail in order to have accurate information for the return. Plus, doing the return and filing by 15 April might be more than a little difficult.

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Now that I have an eVisa for India in hand Princess has suggested getting a “real” visa for India as sometimes the eVisa causes problems entering the country. [sigh] So, the travel agent (Karla at Town & Country Travel) and I have been going back and forth for a few days now filling out paperwork for a visa service company to get the visa from the Consulate in San Francisco. If you have to do this be aware that the visa application must be filled out very specifically and have information in exactly the right place and order. A couple of tries and I can say to speed the process you should make a contact at whatever visa service company you use, send them a draft of the application by e-mail and get them to review it in detail before you actually print out the paperwork and physically get it to them. For India in particular, make certain you make note of the application number so then if you have to fill it out multiple times you can enter that and have at least most of the information pre-filled out for the next iteration. Please learn from our experience!

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Today marks the roughly five weeks to go point and, by coincidence, my birthday. I am now officially as old as the information at Princess Cruises says I am. In the past I’ve been said to be a year older than I was. 🙂

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We’re under the 60 day mark now and time is starting to become more evident. On a personal level I’m done with the vaccinations I picked and have appointments with all the doctors in late December or early January. I’ve also been wearing/breaking in the various clothes I selected for the voyage. Generally it should be warm to hot on the trip so I don’t plan on taking any winter-type clothes. Likely take a jacket that could work should I encounter any cooler weather anywhere as the sole response to that possibility. If nothing else, various ports will have appropriate weather clothes should I not guess right.

[Read more…] about Less Than 60 Days

There are now fewer days left to the start of the world cruise than there are days on the cruise. At the suggestion of my travel agent I have re-applied for a new passport in order to obtain the larger 52-page passport. She felt the regular passport would not have enough pages for visas and stamps and this might prevent me from visiting some of the ports on the trip. The application is at the processing center but not yet in the State Department tracking system.

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