Little by Little

Many of my friends are totally amazed that we would be on a ship for SO LONG!  Ha ha.  I guess if you had asked us 20 years ago if we would be traveling like this we would have looked at you like a deer in the headlights!  But after having done the Grand Asia Cruise with HAL a few years ago we are ready for this adventure.  

How do you prepare for 90 days at sea?  (70 days for the Grand Africa the another 16 days over the holidays on the same ship). Well for me I have to start early and do a little bit each day in researching ports, reading the Cruise Critic entries on the roll call for this cruise, make to do lists and review everything so as not to get confused.  Dan and I watched a lot of YouTube on our ports which was so helpful in deciding what we wanted to do.  I made a calendar for each month with our tours and activities… then I made a narrative document on each tour, the cost, the leader of the tour and agency, contact information and details of the tour.  I made a chronological list of our tours too.  It’s a great cross reference for me.  I’m also sharing it with our friends, Chuck and Betsy Story who are joining us.  I have a soft sided binder with all of this including a copy of our itinerary, our luggage tags, our travel insurance documents and our insurance through our credit card and Air Evacuation which we purchased for international trips.  I have digital copies of everything including our wills, our medical cards, licenses, CC, vaccination cards, yellow fever waiver, passports, our deviation letter from HAL to get off for a safari and any other documents we might need.  We store all this in the cloud so if we ever lose our phones we can access the information at any computer.  We have digital and paper copies too.  So I’m prepared!!

I have received several requests to follow this cruise. Some are from folks that are planning this trip for 2023.  I hope you will let me know by commenting that you are getting the new entries. I’ve had some issues and I’m working on correcting them. As we go along I’ll share some of my documents with you. If there is something in particular you want to know about please don’t hesitate to ask me for it.  I know some of you are following other blogs on this cruise too.  We have just about two weeks until we fly to Fort Lauderdale from Phoenix.  We are going two days early with our friends. We will get our COVID tests the night before we fly out.  We are staying at the Comfort Inn and Suites at the airport.  They offer the shuttles and breakfast. So here are a few documents for you to peruse. 

We got this by email today about some of the entertainment on board…

https://www.hollandamerica.com/en_US/cruise-destinations/booked-guests-grand-voyages/resources-to-print/africa-resources-to-print.html

Here is a link to what Holland sent us about the trip.

Here are the calendars I made. I’ll add the tour list and some of the narrative in another entry.  At this point we have all our vaccinations, COVID omicron booster, our dental cleaning, all our medications ordered for 90 days and our VeriFLY information inputted.  This was new to us but HAL is requesting we do it. You sure need to be tech savvy these days to keep in the loop!!

Let me know if you got this entry and also send a comment if you want special information :)