Traveling Cows

It is like a dream.

We had a good flight (if flights can be good these days) from Pittsburgh through Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale. They didn’t have to brush snow off the plane as they did two years ago. We were met at the airport and shuttled to a hotel with other Holland America cruisers. It turns out that the Prinsendam leaves tomorrow for a month around South America. And, of course, we will be on the Amsterdam for part of the Grand World Voyage.

Janice and I ran off to buy some supplies, then returned to the hotel for a cocktail party and Bon Voyage dinner with over 300 people going on the two cruises who had booked with the same agency, Cruise Specialists. CS was founded by the wife of the then CEO of HA, and the relations are still close.

The dream was having dinner with such a large group, many of whom we had sailed with two years ago, and realizing that it was about to start, again. We were at a table with two people we had dinner with just about every night on the last GWV (until one of them ran a fever and was kicked off the ship in the Seychelles), and four new friends.

Janice Talking with Friends from '09 GWV

Yes, we are indeed home. Clearly, though, we haven’t finished blogging about the cruise. We just got Internet at the apartment so it will make the rest of the posting much easier. We’ll be adding posts for the places we haven’t written about yet as well as adding photos and videos to the post about places we have. We intend to keep the blog up for a while since we’ve had questions already about how long you will be able to view it.

Here is a rough map of the route. I say rough because it doesn’t have all of the ports. Never-the-less, it does give a general idea of where we will be going.

Holland America Lines World Cruise 2009

Three oceans and four continents.