Two Weeks to go...

Exactly two weeks to go now before we head for the airport (almost to the minute!) .  After organising and being MC for our race series awards dinner last night, I can now unwind as apart from a magazine article to write (for BMW UK), the remaining ‘to do’ list is just basics and what could best be described as bits and pieces.  Getting the paperwork details sorted and trying to establish contact with one or two overseas friends to try and pin down a time to catch up,  plus printing luggage tags both for cruises and even the flights, are the important ones.

Why tags for flights?  Well if you’d read the 2012 blog, you may remember my luggage was checked in at San Francisco and presumably, during a behind the scenes luggage check, the sticky label that is normally so difficult to tear off, was separated from the luggage.  It took a week of frantic phone calls, emails and checks to get the luggage identified and back to NZ, fortunately, intact.

I now write each individual flight number on the back of a business card; laminate it; hole punch it; then attach by cable ties, one to each piece of luggage – even the hand luggage. No guarantees of course, but it is a belt and braces approach.

The Dawn Princess is in Auckland this Wednesday en route for Sydney and our good friends Mal & Megan are boarding in Auckland, then cruising to Sydney for the official start of the World Cruise.  We will of course catch up with them in Southampton July 12^th.

I must catch up with Ganjo’s Blog (see the link on the right)  to see if they have resolved their internet connection hiccups on their ship, the Ocean Princess.

Our packing regime has started already, as gone are the days when I could pack for a six week UK trip and be out the door in 30 minutes!  So many things that are now extras such as about half a mile of cables and plugs, chargers, batteries and electronic devices.

Clothing now has to include gear for formal nights and no doubt a range of temperatures, as even though June is the month with the longest hours of daylight in Europe, it doesn’t always mean warm – but it can be.

I have made a big mistake however (note I, not we…) as I thought I was being smart by getting a flight schedule via LA not only on a favoured aircraft (777-300), but at a pre-peak season price and before the end of May, so that the kids would still be at school. I was looking forward to an early start in Disney’s California to experience the new “Cars Land”.  To my horror, I found that we arrive just in time for Memorial Day and that rates a 10/10 for busy!  Oh dear.  We may have to just loll around on the Monday, swim - and much to Paula’s delight, probably catch a bit of the Indy 500 on TV…

Anyway, too bad.  We can’t do anything about it now and we’ll just have to hope the flights are all  good and that our hire car is OK, as I haven’t tried this company before, but they do at least have a one way hire, with a pick up at Heathrow and a drop-off at the Southampton Docks, something our regular company doesn’t do.

So a bit to cram into the two weeks and when we return, some work to do on the house as the re-roofing wasn’t able to be started as there is a shortage of scaffolding (thanks to Health and Safety, every job higher than about 4” needs a full set of scaffolding complete with safety rails – and shortly, air bags too, just in case a builder does a dive over those safety rails…).