Three Cruises, Two Years — Sure, Why not?

First, some back story…

We’re starting to look at our retirement years and have come to the conclusion we’ll be like a lot of people and have to work into retirement. We had thought about Roxan going back to work as a traveling nurse, moving from city to city a couple times a year and maybe living out of an RV. But neither of us believe her body will hold up to working in an urban ER or ICU. I can work from anywhere, and maybe we partially retire and I continue working while living — where? Well, I’ve been throwing around the idea of international living, given the much lower costs of living in some pretty cool regions of the world. Not sure Roxan’s on board with that, and I’m not totally sold either. We have thrown around the idea of living on a cruise ship, one or both of us continuing to work — me doing what I do and Roxan perhaps as a shipboard nurse. Again, all of this is just at the idea stage, I believe we’re a good 8-10 years from any type of decision, let alone a chance in lifestyle.

Is living on a cruise ship actually a thing we’d enjoy?

But one of the things I saw recommended not too long ago for those who are considering cruise ship life is to spend some extended time on a ship and see if it’s really the life you think and would want for yourself. So we’re testing the theory and getting in some bucket list destinations at the same time. The trip last fall could have been a test of that theory, but due to life events we had to get off halfway through it, in Puerto Vallarta.

I spent a day or so researching NCL ship itineraries that can be combined to make a long trip without just sailing in circles.

Here are a few:

• Encore, 3 legs: Alaska RT from Seattle; Seattle to Miami Reposition through Panama Canal; Caribbean. Couldn’t back-to-back a fourth leg because they do the same itinerary the first two times out of Miami. If they did an Eastern Caribbean and a western Caribbean in sequence, we could make it a 4-leg journey.
• Several ships, 4-5 legs: These itineraries all involve an Atlantic Ocean crossing. The unfortunate thing is, due to that pesky Passenger Vessel Services Act, because the ships have a repositioning leg from one US port to another (Boston to Miami, NYC to Tampa, that kind of thing) they have to make that repositioning empty. All US ships (passenger or cargo) must dock in a foreign country if the ends of the trip are both US ports. It’s the reason for Victoria as a stop on the Seattle round-trip Alaska sailings. Passenger ships can stop for an hour or longer (a technical stop). If they don’t do so everyone who made that leg of the trip would have to pay $798 fine each for violating the PSVA. We almost got hit by that last fall. For this particular experiment, we didn’t want to have to take a train from the northeast US to Florida, even though we love train travel.
• Getaway, 3 legs: The itinerary we chose. Leg 1: Istanbul, Greece, Adriatic countries ending near Venice. Leg 2: Venice to Rome, several Adriatic stops and several western Italy stops. Leg 3: Rome to Miami with a stop each in France, Spain, and the Azores. We could have stretched it out one more leg, but again that meant a train ride from Miami to New Orleans. So three legs it is.

This is aboard Norwegian Getaway, as I mentioned above. She is one of two Breakaway-class ships in the Norwegian fleet. We were on her cousin, Encore (which is a Breakaway Plus ship) last fall and will be on Escape, a sister ship to Encore, for our trip to the northeast US and Canada this fall.

This is a Bucket List Trip

We’d planned to take a river cruise as our Europe exploration, and I think we will still do a river cruise (or more than one) sometime to get to parts of the Continent that aren’t accessible from the sea. Given the whirlwind nature of these trips (24 stops in 24 days) we’ll get no more than a fifth grade-level overview of a small part of Europe. We’ll see just enough to know what we want to go back and explore more. And we’ll be READY for the two sailing days, a stop, and seven sailing days to end the trip! I don’t think either of us thought we’d hit 11 countries in just over 3 weeks as our first exposure to Europe…so yeah, this is one to check off in the bucket list.