Puttin' on the Ritz

"Sorry. I can't hear you over the volume of my hair." ~ Anonymous

You may have heard that Cunard, the cruise line on which we'll sail to Norway this summer, is a bit of a throwback to the golden age of cruising. They'd be the first to admit it. Cunard proudly holds to the old traditions.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the dress code. While casual is the watchword during the day, there are only 2 different dress codes for evening.

• Gala (read: formal which means tuxes, dinner jackets, or dark suits for men; ball gowns, cocktail dresses, formal separates for ladies.) or 
• Smart attire (which I interpret to mean: Sunday Best, jackets or suits, tie optional for men, nice separates or dresses for women.)

No denim allowed! So the DH is gearing up to wear a jacket each night and I'm working on my formal evening looks. Of course, this involves more than just the right clothes. I need to figure out my shoe situation, but my friend Vicki (from Table 60 on our World Cruise!) always says that at a dinner party it's what shows from the waist up that matters. So jewelry needs to be coordinated with each ensemble. I need to learn to apply more make-up than I usually wear. And oh! I need to do something with the cotton candy that is on my head.

I've never had terribly thick hair, but the many medications I take for my lung condition have made it thin a bit over the years. I let it go to its natural "silver girl" color so I wouldn't stress it further. But it continues to thin and it's hard to turn out a formal look with so much wispiness going on.

Enter my sister Linda. (If you've been following my blog, you've already met her. We stopped to see her and my BIL at their place in Keystone, SD on our way to our Alaska cruise in 2017. Linda is the one who first introduced me to the joys of cruising when she was a travel agent and took me on a familiarization trip with her.) Anyway, she surprised me with a hairpiece for my birthday and it's a great color match for my bio-hair.   

It feels a little "Nashville" to me. I'm not used to so much hair! But by the time I add some sparklies, I think it'll go a long way toward making me look "gala!"

So, look out, QM2. Here comes me and my hair!

Passports, Visas, Insurance & Other Things that Go Bump in the Night...

"Oh, the horrible importance of unimportant things!" 

~No doubt said by someone who's terribly clever, but whose name escapes me completely at the moment

Into each life--and each adventure--some administrivia must fall. When one travels, this "busy work" comes in the form of forms. Mostly. We must have our paperwork ducks in a row, starting with our...

Passports! It's not enough that they are valid when we embark the QM2 on July 28th and will still be good when we return on August 18th. We learned this vital fact by accident. When we lived in Boston, we indulged in a few week long cruises to Bermuda. One time, the agent at the pier looked at our papers and said, "Oh, my! You barely have a week left on your passport." 

"No, no," I quickly assured him  "The documents won't expire for some months yet."

"But you don't understand," he said. "Your passport must be good for at least SIX MONTHS after the date you are scheduled to return." 

Yikes! If we'd been trying to make that trip a week or two later, we'd have been denied boarding! Fortunately, our passports are valid until the summer of 2020 so we'll be fine for our Norway trip, but we'll need to start the renewal process as soon as we get home.

Visas. Not necessary for this trip, thank very much. (If you've read my post about the back flips we had to perform to get an Indian visa for our world cruise, you understand my semi-euphoria!) Since the US, the UK, & Norway are all part of the Schengen Agreement, we may enter each other's countries for business or pleasure and stay as long as 90 days without a visa. 

It's good to have friends in the world.

Insurance. Along with taxes, this has to be most people's least favorite topic. It's one of those things that everyone must have but no one really likes unless they have to use it. I've always sort of thought of trip insurance as betting against myself. 

We never used to get it, but back then our travel was more spontaneous, less expensive, and we ourselves much healthier. Now I consider trip insurance a necessary evil. 

Since I have a chronic lung disease that means I travel with supplemental O2, we want a "pre-existing conditions waiver" on our policy. To qualify for that, our insurance must be purchased within 21 days of our initial booking. 

Done & done.

All in all, I'd rather be poring over which excursion to book than deal with these issues, but, like laundry and other unavoidable tasks, they must be dealt with. And if I 'm honest, I'm relieved now that I know we've got them covered. This way, none of the horrible things that can happen without them will be the monster under my bed keeping me up at night.

~~~~~

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