We've been thinking about this trip for a year (since we completed last year's Tuscany/Transatlantic Cruise trip). A week on land enjoying and exploring one specific area, followed by a sublime transatlantic cruise on a new and beautiful Celebrity ship, was just the magic travel formula for us. So....of course, we booked this year's transatlantic cruise on
Celebrity's Eclipse sailing from Southampton, England to Miami and immediately began talking about what we would do for a week on land prior to the cruise. It was a no brainer to think of a pre-cruise week in London but we also considered Paris and Amsterdam. We almost immediately recognized that traveling with cruise luggage from home to a European city and than dealing with it multiple times from country to country was not our style...in fact, it's sorta our idea of travel hell! So London it is.
We work hard to earn Marriott points and jealously guard the points until we have enough to earn us a free week somewhere. The reward for such point hoarding is a full week at the
JW Marriott - Grosvenor House in London with points paying for the whole thing!
The next challenge was to calculate airfare. Since fares between the US and Europe have gone up a lot in the past year or two, we checked out the various frequent flyer programs to which we belong. I know, I know, the pundits say that you're better off to put all of your eggs in one FF bag! But moving from one city to another meant that we now tend to fly US Airways rather than American or Delta. And, much to our shock and surprise, we discovered that we had enough points on American (between us) to pay for two one way tickets from Charlotte to London - with the caveat that we first fly to Chicago :( Beggars can't be chosers, as they say, and we were thrilled to find out that our tickets cost $20 in fees, period. Then we found that we still had enough points to fly home from Miami to Charlotte for the palty sum of $10!
In other words, our week in London, including airfare, will cost us $20 plus $10 for the trip home! What a deal. Now we can plan our week, almost without regard to expenses! And my Gold Elite status at Marriott, allows us entry into the Concierge Lounge for breakfast!
I took the spring summer off from planning so that I could plan and carry out our trip to Hawaii with Ellen, Mike, Carson and Nick in April, and trips to Colorado (Jana and Sally) and Utah (Max and Nick). Lots of family fun ensued (as well as fatigue for the grandparents). But I suddenly woke up to the fact that I had a lot of work still to do for 'our' big trip!
Some time ago, I had arranged for a group of 16 folks from our Cruise Critic (CC) Roll Call to travel together on a 'coach', as they say in the UK, from our London hotel to our ship in Southampton. In addition, I had a group of 8 who had booked a driver/guide to pick us up when our ship docks in Cherbourg, France, for a day's visit to Normandy including many WW II sites. I reconfirmed both trips and communicated with my CC friends and now am ready to work on what we will do on our stops in Vigo, Spain and the Azores. We really like to either plan excursions with a private guide, find a local taxi driver to take us around or do 'walk arounds' on our own whenever the port warrants, So...off to find some fun things to do there.
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