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. 🙂
As far as the cruise goes, I’ve actually started to pack; early but useful for better planning. My initial thoughts are to pack for a week, throw in a couple days “slop” in case I can’t get to the washing machines after a week due to excursions or any unforeseen problem. That basically means nine days of “stuff.” For the smaller things (underwear and the like) I’m using packing cubes (zippered containers that hold everything tightly together and are then just solid cubes to pack). This seems to be a good way to keep things together and not have a bunch of random stuff thrown into the suitcase. For larger clothing items (shirts, pants, etc.) I’ll use vacuum bags. This way I can keep them flat yet greatly reduce the amount of space they take up in the suitcase. That worked well on the river cruise this year. The only difference is that on the river cruise I used roll-up vacuum bags (you roll them up to take out the air) which left some of the clothes with wrinkles. On this cruise I will be using bags that you use a small pump (or vacuum cleaner hose if available) to remove the air. This works better and keeps the packed stuff flat.
Next challenge will be to coordinate with Express Scripts to get a 111-day supply of meds instead of the 90 they send. That’s going to require a lot of counting, coordinating renewal dates, and vacation extension requests. Maybe even have to get the doctor to issue new scripts.
Excursions are shaping up and I have many scheduled and paid for. The travel agent is looking at the larger cities for suggestions of things she has experience with. Need to get an appointment with her to see progress. Probably during the holiday break between Christmas and New Year.
The car is serviced and I now know what I have to do to keep it alive during the four months I’ll be gone. Basically, everything will be OK if I put rounded stops under the tires to keep them from developing a flat spot (I have these) and use a battery minder (not a charger but an active device that exercises the battery) on the small battery (on order). So long as the large traction battery in the Prius is mostly charged it should be OK and that’s easy to do by just driving up to the top of the nearby hill, coasting down to add charge to the battery, and then driving into the garage. Almost always puts me into the green (blue is medium charge and green is high charge on the Prius display).
That’s it for now.
