I have two pieces of news, well, three actually.  As with all the best PowerPoint presentations you have ever been forced to sit through, I shall set them out in bullet point form. Well, why not? Apart from anything else, I have the sun in my eyes, and it’s easier for me to find the cursor!

1. I will be tweaking this site over the next few days/weeks. I should be grateful for any comments, suggestions you may have as to whether these changes are better or worse, a la optician’s eye test. “Better 1 or better 2”? Please email me or comment below or find me on Facebook. 

2. I have a new blog, called Mpinion, which will be filled with pretty much any stuff I feel the urge to write that does not relate to cruising and does not occur to me on a cruise ship.  If you would like to read it, I will let you have the link on request, or will post it when i have worked out what it is… :-S Please note, it will be my personal opinions, You may not always agree with me. But then, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?!

Edit: The address of the new blog, in case you are interested, is http://mpinion.wordpress.com/

3. The next cruise is booked. Well, there are several, but I’m only going on one – the parents are going without me on the other(s)!  The next one that I will be going on is a way off. It’s March 2014.  Yes, that’s right. That’s booked a long way ahead, even for us. Not next year, but the year after next.  But it was so popular, we actually had to go on a waiting list, because the whole cruise sold out within days of going on sale.  

I have been searching for a cruise going to these destinations for several years, and it has been very hard going. I wanted my mother to see the Northern Lights, but there was not one cruise ship in the entire United Kingdom, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands that was a “no fly” cruise to Norway.  And my mother won’t fly.  Frankly, after watching that documentary where they deliberately crashed a plane to see what would happen, I’m not so keen any more, myself!

So I kept looking and looking. I even tried joining two together – one to get us from Southampton to Norway and another to get us up near enough to the Arctic. But that was prohibitively expensive, unsurprisingly.  But now there is. Now you see why it sold out so quickly.  Apparently we are not the only people in the entire UK who want to see the Northern Lights without flying.  Who’da thunk?! We have now made it to the top of the waiting list and we are now booked. Huzzah. I hope there will be other cruises in the meantime, obviously, otherwise this blog will go very quiet(!)(stop cheering at the back!), but in the meantime, please see items 1 and 2 to help pass the yawning but not quite interminable wait until 2014 rolls around.