Today I booked a cruise. It’s not until January 2007, but I booked it! The deposit was $500 for both of us; the per-person fare is $914. It’s a benefit cruise for the day care center run by my parents’ church. My mom will be going too, but she’ll be rooming with someone from the church. It’s on Royal Caribbean’s Legend of the Seas, which is a slightly older ship but they usually still keep older ships in nice shape. We booked a Category I guaranteed cabin, which means we have a chance of getting upgraded to something nicer rather than knowing in advance what our cabin number will be. (The tradeoff is that we might end up under the kid program’s main room, or something like that.) The cruise is round-trip from Tampa, and it stops in Grand Cayman, Costa Maya, Belize City, and Cozumel. The stop at Cozumel is on my 26th birthday, and it’s a nice long day there (7am-11pm), so that should be a lot of fun.

I think we are actually going to turn this into a two-week vacation by going to Disney World the week before the cruise. I’ve never been, and we were planning to go sometime this coming fall anyway, but this way we’ll save ourselves paying for a separate trip down there. The combined one-way fares to Orlando and from Tampa seem to be about the same as round-trip fares to Tampa, and Amtrak between the two is only $9. We’ll probably go for one of the timeshare resort stays you can find on eBay - you get a very cheap room rate in exchange for walking around the resort being pitched to for a couple of hours. I’d really love to stay in a Disney resort to get the full Disney experience, but that is a lot more expensive.

So this should be fun, even if it will keep us from taking a vacation in 2006. We’ll probably do something like a long weekend in Williamsburg because that’s fairly cheap, but we can’t do anything major. But a two week Disney + cruise vacation in January 2007 will be awesome. I love traveling.