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.
We’ve started to plan some of the more interesting excursions that she knows about but might not be in the Princess excursion list. There are several she will work on; the rest I will find through Princess. While more expensive, the Princess excursions guarantee return to the ship before it sails. Not getting back in time can result in complications I don’t care to encounter if at all possible.
Needed visas can all be obtained electronically and we will process those closer to the trip as some countries that need visas set a time limit before the trip when they must be applied for. Apply too soon and the visa is not valid when needed.
While I’ve decided to purchase some Internet time on the ship I hope to be able to also use wi-fi in various ports. Just need to go through a VPN (virtual private network) so everything coming from the computer is encrypted rather than plain text. That protects passwords and log-in information.
Still dithering on the photo equipment to take. While I’d love to take the Sony A9, it is big and bulky and a target for people looking for high-priced things to acquire via non-legal means. I guess all cameras fall into that category but full-frame DSLRs would be high on the list I suspect. Sony has a smaller self-contained travel camera coming out any day now and I hope to get to see one ASAP in order to help the decision.
This message is a test of the Google GMail off-line program which would allow me to log-on during the trip, sync messages with GMail, and then log-off. All reading and writing would be performed off-line and then synced later. I’m writing this on my Chromebook without the wi-fi connected. I’ll save it now and connect the wi-fi later and see what happens. That’s -30- for now*.
*[-30- is an old media designation saying you are signing off. I’ll be using it for this blog just because I like it. 🙂 ]