As much as we travel and cruise, we look forward to each adventure, as if it was our first, with great anticipation, and this journey is no exception. We hope to make memories that we can carry with us for the rest of our lives.
Unlike some trips where we are picked up at the crack of dawn, this time we were picked up shortly before Noon. We were driven to our regional airport in a SUV.
The driver, Blake was professional and a terrific conversationalist, the SUV was roomy, and the drive took about one hour which was a great start to the trip.
Over the years, we have met many interesting drivers between Keith's extensive business travel, and our pleasure trips. Blake was one of the finest we have ever had. He actually just started doing driving about three months ago on a part-time basis. It is always interesting to hear about careers and interests of others and today was no exception. He started a business twenty five years ago, after five years in the field that manufactures high end dental bridges and crowns. However, more and more of this is now being done in-house in dental practices, with newer equipment now available on the market, so according to Blake the number of companies doing this line work has declined dramatically by around 33% in the past three years alone. Since he has lost some of his business so he is doing driving and getting ready to start a new business in a totally different field. His wife is a Dental Hygienist and yes he met her through his business. We talked about this, our own dental experiences, and travel. It made the time go by in a blink of an eye. We were so impressed with him, that we have requested him for our return trip.
Since we left on a Sunday, traffic was relatively light. Before the vehicle arrived to our home, we could actually track the vehicle so we knew when the driver was. We thought that was a nice feature and wish more and more businesses would do this.
Our airport has very few international flights so we were very fortunate to be able to not only take a direct flight to London Heathrow but also to secure business class tickets using frequent flyer miles. We arrived to the airport early which is always our preference and had a light lunch, checked in at the ticket counter, and then made our way through security. The airport was not very busy either After a brief stop to pick up some items to read, we relaxed at the airline lounge and like the airport, there were very few people at the lounge and we were told that it had been a very slow day.
We will end now since we have a long day ahead of us between the travel and our first day in London.
More tomorrow.
Keith & Anne Marie
Welcome to our Blog as we travel from London to Boston on-board the Crystal Serenity.
Unlike our World Cruise Blogs, we have kept the format of this Blog relatively simple, so we've just included one video and no tabs. Rest assured, the Blog for our Adventure commencing this December which includes not only the 2015 World Cruise Voyage, but also some voyages which precede and follow the World Cruise, will feature several videos and a revised tabs section, with updated information and photos.
In the meantime at the end of this first post, continue to scroll down where you will come to a iMovie. Before you click on the arrow key to start the video, be sure to turn on your volume control and if you wish to view the video on full screen, click on the icon located to the right of the HD icon.
We will do our best to Blog each day, and we will include daily highlights, along with several photos.
As part of this trip, we will spend four days in London prior to the start of this cruise. At the bottom of the home page, we've included the itinerary for this voyage.
Most recently, we sailed on Crystal Serenity from January 5 until we disembarked in Rome on May 7 of this year. It was another amazing journey and we made numerous memories which will last a lifetime. We look forward to returning to Crystal Serenity for this voyage.
We also wish to thank the many members from Crystal Cruises, along with our wonderful senior travel consultant, Gerri, and her very capable assistants, and the entire travel agency for everyone's help and assistance as we prepared for this trip.
Finally, for those of you who have followed our previous Blogs, you know that we do our best to Blog realtime, rather than waiting until we arrive home where we would have more time to read, proofread, and smooth out any rough edges to all that we have written. As such, there will be typos, grammar errors, and even photos not perfectly edited in this Blog, and we apologize up-front for this. However, we believe the benefits of Blogging realtime outweigh any errors contained in this Blog, and we hope you do too.
We also want to note that our focus in each of our Blogs is on all of the positive experiences which we enjoy on each journey. In life, we have come to realize not everything can be perfect each and every minute of the day. However, rather than focusing on the few things which may not go our way, we choose to focus on the vast majority of our experiences which are indeed positive. Therefore, you will likely not hear about any items that were not 100% perfect, nor will we gossip or put down others including places that we visit. Our view is that we will have a far better time by being positive. Also, when we look back at each journey, we want focus on all we enjoyed about each trip, rather than something that didn't go our way. We hope you understand our perspective. Life is too short and we believe in enjoying each and everyday.
We will update this Blog either on the day we travel or sometime shortly after arriving to London.
So, stay tuned for more..........
Keith & Anne Marie
