95 Days!

Yep; 95 days to our next cruise (Carnival Dream, to Nassau, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten).

But we're also incredibly incorrigible... I got an email from CruCon.com for their "Christmas in July" sale. We had just been talking about wanting to get away for the December holidays, when - poof! - this email popped into my inbox, like it was meant to be.

The email had a list of all the cruises that would be sailing over Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Christmas AND New Year's. Perfect way to sort it, but there were so many to choose from! So we took a look, and started highlighting those that seemed interesting.

To cut the list of potential options down (ah, the tyranny of choice!), we only looked at those ships sailing over Christmas (but also got us back home before New Year's). There were still too many choices, so we started crossing things off:

• No cruises to the Pacific coast of Mexico. It's really too chilly (we learned this on last year's 3-day cruise the week before Christmas).
• No Carnival cruises - not because of any problems we've had with them, but because we've been on them fairly often and wanted to give some other line a chance.
• Nothing longer than 14 days.
• Nothing shorter than 7 days.
• No sailing that actually embarked or debarked on 12/25.
• Finally, we tried to avoid those that went to places we'd already been (although when push comes to shove, we'd have gone back to Cozumel or Key West or just about any other Western or Eastern Caribbean port!).

Of the cruises that were left, two caught our eye, but one really caught our fancy. One was leaving from Miami on Norwegian Caribbean's Dawn. It was a 9-night Caribbean trip, leaving from Miami and stopping in at Samana, Tortola, Antigua, Barbados, and St. Kitts. This one was on the list because it was on NCL (a new cruise line for both of us) and all the Caribbean ports were those we haven't yet visited... definitely a possibility. The other cruise was leaving from Barcelona (Spain) on Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas. This one was 12 nights, stopping in Palermo (Italy), Piraeus and Rhodes (Greece), Alexandria (Egypt), and Valetta (on Malta).

Can you guess which one we booked? Oh yeah, we need to brush up on our Espanol, people - we're spending Christmas in Barcelona! Well, to be precise, we'll be boarding the ship in Barcelona on DH's birthday... for Christmas, we'll actually be docked at Alexandria - maybe that will be the day we'll be able to take a tour to the pyramids!

Yes, we're bad. But in such a fabulous way! So - 95 days to cruise #1 and 151 days to cruise #2! (Anyone want to come along, I definitely recommend checking out CruCon... I normally book through cruise.com, but CruCon had the bigger sale going on. Hurry!)