Suddenly, it is nearly time to leave! With Xmas and New Year and helping our youngest daughter move to Paris for four months for her degree programme, it has come around suddenly. We are now awash in packing for the trip. The weather will mainly be warm but there are cool/cold portions so we have to take winter clothes too. We are also packing a "shop" suitcase full of extra supplies that we will/may need along the way like toiletries, medicines, wine, gin, :...

Ulp..... we have just paid the balance for the cruise. Rang the travel agent at cruise.co.uk and when she confirmed what was owing, I just said "urrgg... let's move quickly on shall we?". It was all over in a couple of minutes. We put it on our BA Amex card despite the fees for that being higher than a Visa or Mastercard. It will more or less earn us a free companion ticket anywhere in the world on BA for 2015/16. As we are planning to return to either Austr...

Although there's a few months yet before we actually sail, we have begun to make preparations for the trip. First was to prepare an itinerary of the ports we will visit and begin to plan our activities in each one We want to dive in quite a few places so we will be taking our diving kit with us. One of the benefits of cruising in and out of the UK is that luggage restrictions really don't apply. We can take as much luggage as we like and can fit into our cabi...