Finally!

Dateline Calgary:

It had been a hot minute since either of these two travel addicts had gone anywhere of note, and cabin fever was settling in. Our usual winter escape down to Palm Springs wasn’t going to happen this year, because reasons. Last year was toast due to me finding out that I had prostate cancer, then finding out that it had metastasized and run rampant all through my abdomen, which was already home to stage 4 lymphoma, thank you very much. So radiation and toxic meds and all of that noise kept us home last year. This year, we decided to do a cruise instead of the Palm Springs getaway.

We looked up to see where Viking was going, because we love Viking (you can tell by the other travelogues I’ve done). One popped up called “Asia Isles and the Coasts of Africa” and we looked at the itinerary and aw HALE yeah, that’s a thing we wanted to do. Clicked on it.

Sold out.

Looked for other dates and there weren’t any. Called Viking and asked when they would do it again. They said, “maybe never.” So here’s the thing:
Viking does a World Cruise every year. It’s a ridiculous 150 or more days on the ship and costs about as much as a small house. Per person. Anyway, when the World Cruise doesn’t sell out by a certain date, they break it up into segments and sell the empty cabins for those segments. This year, the World Cruise was unable to travel its usual route up the Red Sea, with stops in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel… because there’s a war on in Gaza and the Red Sea is a no-sail zone. It’s understandable that someone spending the money for a World Cruise would want to see those places, so it didn’t sell out.

But the segment we wanted did. Ah, well. We shrugged our shoulders and booked a pair of back-to-back Caribbean cruises, something neither of us had done before. Should be fun!

Then… I get an early-morning email from the lady I had spoken to at Viking. “Are you up?” I replied and the phone rang seconds later. Someone had canceled their cruise, so there was an empty cabin. They held it for 72 hours while we figured out what it would take to cancel the other one. As it turns out, no problem at all! So we’re going on the Viking cruise after all!

This post is going to be long enough without going into all of the stuff that kept us busy between then and today, but it was a LOT. Before we knew it, travel day was upon us and we found ourselves in the Maple Leaf Lounge - Air Canada’s lounge at Calgary airport.

A quick but turbulent flight got us to Vancouver, where we were delighted to discover that our tickets qualified us for the Signature Suite lounge and wooo, it’s nice. The spicy pork wontons were delicious (and actually spicy, not “Canadian spicy”!)

Not only that, when you order a “very dry gin martini” and the waiter comes back to clarify whether you’d prefer one drop of vermouth or no vermouth at all, you know it’s going to be a good one.

The layover in Vancouver was around 4 hours, so we had ample time to enjoy the lounge. Before long, however, our bird arrived and we had a look at what would be ‘home’ for the next 16.5 hours.