There is one pic this week.
Hello from our clubhouse. Being in the clubhouse is becoming a real habit for us. We had a party here Friday night. Then another one Saturday night. After we got home, hurricane Bill came through our area and brought an amazing thunderstorm. We went out on the back porch to watch it. It was quite a show. Lightening would strike, seemingly freezing the rain drops and suspending them in mid-air. I even saw a fox walking by, totally unconcerned by the rain (but much more concerned about my pocket flashlight). When we went back into the house, we found all our Verizon services didn’t work. I decided power was probably out somewhere, and we went to bed. This morning, Verizon was still out. I called them on my cell phone. I waited over an hour for somebody to answer before giving up. We went to Panera to get breakfast and use the internet. I started a chat with a Verizon person. After quite a bit of back-and-forth, she asked me to manually reboot our “ONT box”. I lost my patience, reminded her we had no services, told her we were at a coffee shop, and asked her to schedule a technician. She said somebody will be out Thursday (4 days from now). I’m not too happy with Verizon at the moment.
After counting money for our church, I started poking around. I found wasps had built a nest in one of the Verizon boxes. I don’t know if that caused our problem, but I figure it’s not a good thing. I sprayed them, then decided to come over to the clubhouse to use the public Wi-Fi while I let the wasps die for a while.
There’s travel in our future. Next week, we will go to North Carolina and stay at “Monroe Mansion” (Jul’s). The grandkids are lacking day care Monday, so we’ll have an unusual schedule. We leave Saturday morning and return Tuesday. There just could be some pics when I get around to writing after we get back.
Alaska Cruise
Danita wants to take a very specific 2-week sea cruise to Alaska. Of all the cruises offered, only Holland America has one that visits one set of ports going north and a different set going south. Most cruises visit only one set of ports because most people don’t stay on the boat two weeks. They take the boat for one week in conjunction with a land tour. Danita has had her eye on this cruise for a long time. We decided to postpone the cruise and take the “hard” trips while we are younger. But Saturday we got a piece of junk mail from Holland America. Buried in the middle of a boring brochure was an offer to take this cruise at half price. Danita doesn’t miss much, and she certainly didn’t miss this. Even the internet didn’t offer the discounted price. We called up, found the deal is real, and took the offer on the spur of the moment. Buying the cruise “on a whim” was very stressful for us (in a good way). We seldom spend money without weeks or months of research. Of course, Danita had done her research over a year ago. Still, we would have normally waited at least a week while carefully considering all the ramifications.
We’re leaving August 23 and returning Sept 8. We’re especially looking forward to visiting Kodiak and Sitka, which are not usually stops for a cruise. We have a night at the Fairmont Hotel included in our cruise, which we’ll use to adjust to west coast time and as insurance against airline delays. On the way home, we found that flying on Labor day is quite expensive. We decided to stay a day in a hotel, because the savings in air fare more than pays for the room. We don’t have our return hotel picked out yet, but it won’t be at the Fairmont when it’s on our nickel. Boat Wi-Fi is expensive. And while I’m sure the ice is impressive, I doubt that endless pictures of ice are very interesting to anybody else. I probably won’t be posting daily.
We had quite an experience buying the air tickets. The cruise line couldn’t come close to the airline price offered by Southwest, so we decided to buy our own air tickets. We had everything all lined up, ready to hit the “commit” button, when Danita suggested we check one last possibility. The last possibility didn’t make sense, so we went back to the earlier tickets. This time Southwest said they couldn’t honor the price and offered us the tickets at $1,000 more. Each. (That’s $2,000 total.) I got disgusted and closed the computer. A little while later, I went back and got the tickets at the price we were originally offered. Who can understand these things? Not me, for sure.
That’s a lot of news for now. I hope this finds everybody doing well.