Sorry about the long, long break between posts. After two weeks of driving across the United States we finally reached Tampa, Florida-- and the same moment we took the exit to Chris' mom's house, my mom called to say my grandfather had had an accident and was in the hospital. He passed away several days later, the day before Christmas.
Chris and I bought plane tickets and flew back to Seattle for the funeral. It was five crazy days... Happy to be back in that beautiful city and see our friends, yet emotionally very drained.
Now we're back in Florida, refocused, and here comes the victory part: we have our tickets to Europe, and we'll be going by ship.
We first looked into cruising to Europe instead of flying on my grandparents' suggestion, actually. I found one transatlantic cruise sailing in February, run by Carnival. It went from Florida to Rome, and to my total shock, was less expensive than travel the same distance by flying economy! Unfortunately, Carnival had no interest whatsoever in making it possible for us to bring our bikes with us. They have a no bike policy, not even if you take them apart, stick them in a box, and hide them in your cabin. Nor do they have any office or place where we could ship our bikes to in Rome... and we didn't really want to ship our bikes to a post office and have them wait there for us, even if it would be allowed. It would just make me really nervous. So, based on the impression given to us by Carnival that all cruise ship companies had a similar policy, we gave up on cruising and resigned ourselves to one long miserable day of flying. But kept stalling on buying our plane tickets...
Then, just after we came back from Seattle, I thought I'd do another check on cruises. I had only been looking at February before, but now we needed more time to get ready. Lo and behold: a cruise on Holland America Line, leaving in the end of March, to Rome. I called, fully expecting to get the same answer on bikes. But they were totally cool with it. As long as the bikes are in your cabin, no problem. We even got a letter from the cruise director to make sure. So we're cruising to Europe in the end of March! Now we just have to get our bodies as ready as we can for five hours a day on our bike seats. And spend more time in the ship's gym than the buffet.
Sigh. Buffets are a cruel mistress.
