It all started with an evening with friends, a bottle of wine, and a casual comment about a bucket list item.
We were over at our friends house for dinner, booze and good company, and, as it does with people our age, we talked about our travels and bucket lists.
We had always wanted to go to Australia. I have family there and Rick has never been and, of course, who doesn’t want to go to Australia, and New Zealand??
Of course, our host happens to be a sales person for Expedia Cruise, and this is where the serendipity happens, there was a sale on a cruise, to Australia! Bobby is an excellent sales person and within an hour we had our credit card out and and we were booking a cabin with a veranda on the cruise.
Fast forward number of months, and we were just returning from a wonderful trip to the UK and Wales for our friends wedding. The flights were a nightmare. On the way to the airport, seats were changed. We had purchased premium seats to have extra legroom as Rick was still recovering from his knee surgery. And they were gonna put us in the middle of nowhere with no legroom (oh, but they were gonna refund us the difference). This was unacceptable. After much stress and negotiation, we did get our leg room, but not together. The return trip was not much better.
Upon our return to Canada I immediately had to fly out to BC with my mother to support her with death of her brother. Again, another set of nightmare flights, When I came home, I started researching different ways to return from Australia because there was no way I wanted to be on a plane for 12 hours. After looking at a number of beautiful cruises to a number of exotic places I found out that the ship that we were taking there would be returning in the spring (or is that the fall, because we will be down under?). Anyway, we called Bobby, the next thing you know we booked our return cruise, same ship, same deck, just a few cabins down from trip down.
At the same time Rick started looking at how we were going to cross the country, to get from Ontario to Seattle. At first we planned to fly. Then we realized we didn’t wanna do flight that either.
Being retired, we have all the time in the world, and we like our creature comfort. We crunched some numbers, and realized that when you add up the cost of rental car, and flights, it was most cost effective to drive.
So we decided to drive.We have friends who live on Victoria Island, who have some property so we will drive there and leave our car with them, and……
Take the Victoria clipper over to Seattle where we will catch our cruise ship. Conveniently, the return cruise ship stop at Victoria before going on to Seattle. So we plan to jump ship one day early!
That, my friends, is how this all came to be.
What’s in the top of your bucket list?
Our Wicked Walkabout 
Leave a comment