Well, we made it.  4919 nautical miles.  14 nights.  6 time zone changes.  7 consecutive days at sea.  And now we’re across the pond, marvelling at the architecture in Barcelona and kissing on the streets of Paris.

Our home away from home for 14 days

It turns out cruises are a great means of transportation.  While I probably wouldn’t choose a cruise vacation any time soon (for reasons I will explain later), it certainly beats a long flight followed by the jet lag that’s certain to occur.  Interestingly enough, we only met a handful of other travellers on board that were staying in Spain or Europe for a while… the vast majority were on a two week cruise vacation, taking flights homes within a day or two of arrival .

In case you’re new to the site or you missed our cruise announcement post, we just took a 14 night, 5 star Transatlantic cruise from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Barcelona, Spain.  We booked the cruise because it was simply the cheapest option.  Taxes and tipping included, our cruise package cost us $1306.48 for two people.  That included food, entertainment, and accommodation for 14 days.

View from the Royal Promenade of the ship

The cruise itinerary looked something like this:

Day 1 – Depart Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Day 2 – Port of Call: Nassau, Bahamas
Day 3 – At sea
Day 4 – At sea
Day 5 – At sea
Day 6 – At sea
Day 7 – At sea
Day 8 – At sea
Day 9 – At sea
Day 10 -Port of Call: Tenerife, Canary Islands
Day 11 – At sea
Day 12 – Port of Call: Cadiz, Spain
Day 13 – Port of Call: Malaga, Spain
Day 14 – Port of Call: Valencia, Spain
Day 15 – Arrive in Barcelona, Spain

The Good

There are a lot of obvious benefits to long distance travel via cruise ship: two weeks of luxurious hotel-like accommodation, delicious buffets and fine dining experiences, entertainment of all varieties, and more leisure activities than you’ll know what to do with.

The food was amazing. Before you ask, yes we are still vegetarians. We indulged in sushi almost every other day, as they made vegetarian rolls on request.  We also indulged in (more than) our fair share of desserts… and we did it all without significant weight gain!

One of the great vegetarian options in the dining room… eggplant parmesan

We went ice skating, rock-climbing, played mini-golf, worked out in the gym, relaxed in the hot tub, swam in the pool, took in an enrichment lecture, caught a Broadway-esque musical, participated in a few champagne art auctions (by drinking the free champagne, not by bidding, silly), watched an ice-skating show with world champion skaters, read books, shared great conversations with our dinner mates, and took in many other shows including a hypnotist, juggler, violinist, Paul McCartney impersonator, and motown group. There’s probably some stuff I’m missing, but you get the idea. And it was all included at no extra charge!

Rock-climbing wall

One of the less obvious benefits of the cruise, however, was just getting to shut off our travel brains. One problem that us full time travelers have in common with the retired community is that we never get a day off. The CONSTANT internal banter of where are we going next? how do I find my hostel? is my passport safe? is my wallet safe? is that guy going to try to rob me? is this area safe? is this hostel safe? and so on and so forth never stops.  After months on the road, it’s exhausting.  Being able to shut off that part of our brains and just…BE was phenomenal.

Mike’s Leonardo moment (okay, I forced him to this)

Another plus was the time change.  Rather than shifting 6 hours ahead in one fell swoop, we had a one hour time change six times on the cruise.  Always on a sea day, the clock would simply jump from 11:59 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.  This gave our bodies the time we needed to adjust and we arrived in Barcelona on-time in more ways than one.

Whether it was losing an hour a day most days, or the sheer quantity of activities available to us, the days flew by on the cruise.  We thought we might get bored or feel closed in with seven days at sea, but that was not so.  We were actually sad when the sea days to ended.

Some of the art in the champagne art auction

The Bad

What didn’t we like about the cruise?

The food, though amazing, got a little repetitive.  We skipped the dining room half the nights because they would often only have only a curry or pasta dish for vegetarians which was the same curry or pasta dish as the day before, and sometimes the day before that. There were many more whole food options in the buffet.

I proved that gastrointestinal problems can strike not only in Central American, but on a cruise ship too.  I quarantined myself in our stateroom for about 24 hours while I expelled more fluid than I thought my body could hold.  Luckily our cipro supply from Central America made short work of the bug/food poisoning/whatever it was.

We were pretty much our own age category on the boat. The average age of our co-cruisers was a wee bit higher than us… by about 35 years or so! This made it tough to form more than superficial relationships with anyone, and we really didn’t meet too many people that we could relate to. Our dinner mates were good company, however, and made our dining experiences our social highlights of the trip.

Formal night in the dining room… notice the age of the other diners

The ports were the least enjoyable part of the cruise.  We loved all the Spanish cities we stopped at, but afterwards they all started blending together in our minds.  We typically had about 8 hours to exit the ship, get out of the cruise terminal, explore a port city, and return.  8 hours is just not enough time to experience a place.

We thought briefly about some of the shore excursions that were offered through the cruise line, but they were all quite expensive, fairly brief (1-3 hours) and worse still, took away from the already limited time we had to explore each port city.

This is why we wouldn’t book a cruise vacation anytime soon – it’s just not our kind of travel experience.  But would we book a re-positioning cruise as a method of transportation?  Absolutely.

Ice skating show onboard the ship

Infobox:

Interested in booking a cruise as transportation?  Check out transatlantic and re-positioning cruises on a site like

I have to end with a towel animal… this little monkey was happy to see us!

In an effort to be as prepared as possible for our big RTW, we decided to book ourselves a pre-RTW vacation in Las Vegas. I know what your thinking, “What? Did I read that right, you’re going on a pre-RTW trip? Who does that? Can’t you handle 4 more months of work? You should really be working on those travel funds!”

Unfortunately for you, you’re wrong. Now is the perfect time to spend some of those travel funds. No, not because we really need a vacation, but because our friends Scott and Tamara, pictured below, are getting married. Congratulations guys! Being the good friends we are, we booked flights and hotels and are all set to meet up with them on their special day… plus a few days before.

Tamara & Scott on our couch

As the title of this post suggests, booking this trip allowed us to practice buying tickets the way we would for our actual trip. Well, maybe we won’t be booking return flights. And, maybe we would have more flexibility in our schedule on the big trip. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same idea.

Starting out, we knew that the wedding was on the 7th of June, a Tuesday. We also knew that Ashley was only entitled to 3 days vacation and, to make the most of it, we would want to leave sometime on the weekend before.

Flights

I searched the web long and hard looking for the cheapest flights. I could rattle off a half dozen websites that we used, but I’m not going to. I’m just going to give you what we found to be the best. http://www.farecompare.com/

Here’s why it’s the best:

My dates are flexible
Selecting this option will allow you to quickly search different departure dates. When we first started into this, we were looking to leave on Sunday June 5th and return Wednesday June 8th. After a quick look at the price calendar, we discovered that we could save $40 ($20 each) by leaving 1 day earlier. That was enough to pay for our hotel room that night, effectively giving us a free extra day on our pre-RTW vacation.  If we had more flexibility, we could have saved a bit more by travelling later in the week, or a bunch more by taking off a month prior.

FareCompare My dates are flexible

FareCompare Flexible Dates Calendar

Taxes are included in all quotes
I don’t know about you, but I prefer to compare apples to apples. Sorting all flights by prices that include all fees and taxes sure beats the heck out the way most sites do it: hiding the extra fees until you click to book.

The prices it found were the cheapest
I could find the same price on other websites, but I couldn’t find anything cheaper including the airline’s website.

They have this awesome map
I like this map. It shows you how much flights cost from your location to anywhere else. This is going to be a great tool for planning out several legs of a longer multi-city trip. You’re right, we didn’t use it to book this trip, but it is still cool.

FareCompare Travel Map

The bad:

There’s always a catch. When you make your first search, FareCompare forces you to open up 3 additional browsers to view the same search on other travel sites like Oribtz and Expedia. No matter how you slice it, you are going to have 5 open browsers when you use this website.  Not the end of the world, but certainly an annoyance.

I assume this is how FareCompare makes its money, by advertising and referring you to the other major travel search engines. Fortunately I found this could be avoided. First, click the When-to-Fly link at the top of the page, then click the Search Flights link. Or, simply click here.

TD Travel Rewards

I should point out  that despite the long rave review above, we did not use farecompare.com to actually book our tickets. Once we found the cheapest flight on the day we wanted, we headed over to our VISA’s website to make the actual booking. Why? Because we earn points that can be redeemed to offset future travel at a rate of 4.5% when we book directly through the TD Travel Rewards website.  Booking through FareCompare would only get us the standard rate of 1.5%. In case you are wondering, we are using the TD Travel VISA we told you about earlier in our banking post.

This process went smoothly. We were able to find the same flight at the same price FareCompare had. We were even able to cash in $100 worth of points we had already saved reducing the cost of our booking.

I’m glad we made this practice run now.  At the end of the booking process there was a small note indicating that we would receive our booking confirmation with 48 hours. We didn’t have to wait that long, but we did wait a full 24 hours before we received the first bit of email correspondence.

Because of this rather long wait for any sort of confirmation, I did some more research and found this statement:

“Advance booking times are dependent on a number of factors including what you book. We recommend that you book at least 14 days in advance. However, we can usually accommodate bookings within 48 hours of your departure time.”

Yikes, 14 days! I’m sure glad I found this out now. I would hate to have learned that lesson the hard way; sitting in the airport as our plane flies off wondering “why the heck didn’t they send out our booking, it’s been 12 hours?”

So there you have it, our flight finding/booking process. We’d love to hear any suggestions on how you find cheap flights. The cheaper we can find the better.

P.S. Please don’t post way cheaper flight deals to Las Vegas from Regina.  Our tickets are non-refundable, and it will make us feel bad.  Thanks.