Day 0 minus 50
With places and people we want to visit on our trip pretty much settled, it is time for us to consider at our modes of travel.
We loathe long haul flights! We have tried all sorts of flight combinations to make these long trips more bearable, but nothing has really worked. With that in mind we talk about traveling by ship for a good part of this journey. A few years earlier we traveled by ship from Auckland to Los Angeles and then returned home by a long flight. The trip home was so bad that it took away much of the joy we had experienced on the sea voyage.
So this time we think that we’ll look for a sea voyage home. We’ll fly Auckland to Singapore; have a brief stopover then fly onto Frankfurt.
We like to visit Europe after the main summer season but before the winter sets in, so we are thinking about leaving New Zealand in September.
Now most cruise lines head south to our part of the world early in the New Year, so their passengers are escaping the chills of winter and heading into the Southern summer.
We search and search for a cruise ship that would be heading ‘down-under’ in our late spring/early summer. We both search independently as we go about searching the net differently from each other. We seem to be looking for weeks and we are almost at the point of giving up, when I decide to try cargo ships. I put in tentative dates and quite by chance come across a cruise-line called Cruise and Maritime Voyages. They do an annual repositioning trip from Tilbury to Fremantle, Australia with a stop in Auckland! Eureka!
We book our trip home; then begin working backwards for the middle and beginning bits!