Garth Bigelow - Thoughts - September, 2007

We booked the third and final cruise today. It is almost the same exact stops as the first cruise but on a different cruise line: Royal Caribbean. Due to picking an inside cabin and a last minute deal, it is nearly half the price of the first one. And with Tracy picking up half the tab, that makes it feel almost cheap. Figuring in that we will probably mostly stay onboard most of this trip that also cuts down on excursion expenses. Still it feels weird to have spent so much this month, especially as this is a month where very little comes in financially. But I figure my choices are watching TV until the clock runs out, or putting some life in my life.

Even though it is clearly the right decision, it still it nags at me to spend like this, especially when I accepting outside financial help. That's my Dad's side of the gene pool pushing at me, from my Mom's side is the feeling I should be making more of the experiences.

Tracy has booked her return flight: Oct 6th. Which makes an even two months. :)

I've completed almost all the errands that need doing before we begin our next cruise on Saturday. I'm far less stressed (if at all) this time around.

There will be less 24 hours between cruise #2 and #3, so I will essentially be offline for 15 days. That's the longest I've been offline practically since they invented the Internet. It feels rather freeing though.

Physically it's a rough day, I had Massage Therapy the day before and now my tortured muscles and joints are all complaining.

I should learn not to write that things are going well. I write that I have my cash flow problems hopefully inline for whatever happens and I take hits on all three support legs of that plan. Thankfully it all happened after the cruises were paid for (and pretty much most happened while I was on the second cruise) or I might have backed out of spending the money. But the problem is cash flow not credit expense and I managed to turn each trip into positive cash flow (weird how life hands you opportunities just before you know you need them.) anyway, but it messes up the vague outlines of plans that I was trying to put into place. I think I have to go back to putting effort into the DVDs, but I am unsure. Hopefully I'll know before the end of this last cruise.

Anyway, I just got off cruise #2 today. I'll go over that briefly in a moment and back fill in detail later when I get back from cruise #3 which begins tomorrow. Busy, busy. Cleaning clothes (thanks Tracy), doing finances, catching up on mail, finances and email (my mother is upset with me for reasons I can not fathom from the emails) and the repacking, et al will have to be left for the morning before we leave at 11am back to Port Canaveral.

Okay the trip in quick nutshell - remember the two early cruises will eventually be filled in with more info and pictures on the dates that they happened. Due to Hurricane Dean destroying the port in Belize, the one stop I was really looking forward to was cancelled and the itinerary changed to Key West, Cozumel, Progresso and Nassau. This was a big disappointment for Tracy and I and one that I was a bit upset because we booked after Hurricane Dean so Carnival should have updated their website. Bait and switch if you ask me. Only Progresso offered sun friendly activity so it was the only stop I ended up getting off at. That stop, while not what I expected was magically with some underground swimming opportunities that were simply magical. The first experience to move me in far far too long. It lent me hope that quite honestly I needed to feel.

Being in the "cheap seats" the service was not as superior as it had been the first time, but other than the shower head incident, everything would have been great if we weren't comparing it to the service from trip we had just been on. And we had learned to work the system a little better, so we did things like make sure the materdee knew about Tracy's ideas on food groups. We also discovered to adults only, open until midnight hot tub on the back of the ship.

Tracy got burnt to a crisp when she forgot sunblock on the final stop at Nassau, when she went motoring around the island. I think we will be a couple days into this next trip before she recovers.

That's it for now. I have finances to do, then catch some sleep before hitting the morning at a dead run.

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