Looking forward to a holiday

It looks like the holiday is on - another cruise, after much hassle with banks (quelle surprise).

Once again working with my friends on this so we can get a nice cabin on an NCL ship. It is 9 days around Norway and Scotland next month.

I am once again really looking forward to this, and I hope it will be relaxing. It will be a lot of drinking and playing cards!

Holidays are funny things. To be honest, the biggest benefit of a holiday in many ways is that people know I am on holiday and do not hassle me. I could take a holiday at home (and I know people that do that) with much the same effect except in my case I know people would hassle me anyway as they would know I am not on a "proper" holiday. Maybe I need to "fake" a cruise one year!

This is a bit different because it is the same. I.e. it is a holiday I have done almost exactly the same once before, with the same people, on the same ship to mostly the same places. Later in the year so weather should be better for the hot tub.

It is always rather odd doing that - you "know the ropes" and so do not spend half the holiday learning what you need to know. A normal holiday can involve a lot of that, and when you are doing something like a cruise you learn a lot of the cock-ups and special cases and incomprehensible rules they have which spoil the holiday. You also learn the things you wish you had brought with you. A second time we should not fall foul of any of them.

We did this once in Rhodes, a second holiday a month later than the first, and it was really quite different. The hat I lost the first time was recovered from the restaurant owner that though he could keep it :-) But the second time of any holiday is always very different in so many ways, and a different experience in itself.

Once again sailing from UK (Southampton) which is so much nicer than flying somewhere first. I cannot stress this enough. One thing I am doing is taking my Mac with me, the cabin has the space, rather than a laptop. This is one more heavy bit of luggage, but all that means is the taking from car, walking like 10m to the luggage drop off, and done. They take to the cabin (I have a nice flight case for it on order). Taking an extra, heavy, flight case on an actual flight would be a lot of hassle. A cruise is the holiday, unlike a flight which is getting to the holiday, so starting in the UK a short drive away really is just so much less stressful, and the same coming back. Flying home is one of the worse parts of so many holidays.

Whilst NCL are a pain, and have lots of issues, the actual holiday is not bad, and they have cabins that start from a few hundred pounds for a nice trip. So I am hoping a second instance of the same holiday will work well and be relaxing. We can but hope.

I have also had fun with making FireBricks cope with the challenges of high latency (satellite) links, which I think we have sussed, but I don't rule out more work on that from the cabin. Last time it was DNS timeouts.

I hope to do loads of videos and pictures once again. Not sure I'll do the daily blog, but we'll see.