Globus Tour of Iceland

Psssst....  Wanna go to Iceland?  Well, hop on board and let's go.

I already know what you are going to say.  You don't have to lecture me.  I sit around Dallas all winter long whining about how cold it is and how I hate being cold and when it finally begins to warm up, I start talking about trips to Iceland of all places.  But here's the deal.  We'll be taking this trip at the end of July.  Do you know how freaking hot it is going to be in Dallas, Texas on July 28th when we leave town on this imaginary trip that could be real if you've got the dough?  In Dallas our average daily high is 96 degrees.  And let's face it.... if it only gets up to 96 degrees on July 28th, we'll all be talking about how nice and cool the weather has been heading into August.  It's NOT LIKELY!  So now, how are you feeling about Iceland?  I thought so.

First of all, I'm thinking that we need to fly in on July 27th.  Airfare to Iceland isn't cheap.  It's going to cost us $1206 per person roundtrip.  We'll fly into Reykjavik via Jet Blue to Boston and then Iceland Air from Boston to Reykjavik.  We're leaving Dallas at 6:20 AM and will arrive in Iceland at 11:40 PM on Saturday night, Ugh!  Long day, but who cares... we're on vacation!!!  We won't be joining our tour group until 6 PM Sunday so we have most of the day to ourselves in Reykjavik to either sleep in and recover from the flight or discover some of the local sights that our Globus tour group won't be visiting.  By the way, the average high temperature during our visit will be 54 degrees.  Slightly cooler than Dallas' forcasted highs for any day in July.

Since this is likely to be my only trip to Iceland, I choose to do a tour on Sunday so I am going on the Viking Horse Tour which is TripAdvisors #1 ranked thing to do in Iceland.  They pick you up at your hotel at 10 AM and will drop us back off about four and a half hours later giving us plenty of time to meet up with our tour group at 6 PM.  The horseback riding tour is 10 - 15 minutes from Reykjavik so we will have plenty of time on horseback and according to at least one reviewer on TA they even allow time at a local bar after the ride for a beer with the tour guide.

As you can see from these photos I found on their website, the countryside is beautiful.  They only allow small groups.  So that the experience is personalized.  Sounds like a wonderful day.

After we are dropped back off following our Viking Horse Tour, we will meet our Globus Tour Director and traveling companions at a welcome dinner at our hotel and then stay one more night before leaving on our tour.

Day 2 will start out with a driving orientation in Reykjavik followed by a visit to the geothermal heat and electric power station in Hellisheidavirkjun.  Read the fascinating article provided on the link.  And look at the amazing photo below.  I think this is probably the only power plant I would ever look forward to visiting during a vacation.

Next we'll stop at the hot springs at Geysir and meet with the chef at the restaurant who will walk with us to the geothermal areas where we will enjoy freshly baked hot-spring bread with Icelandic butter, boiled eggs and herring all served with a glass of geysir schnapps, served at freezing point.  I'm not too sure about the boiled eggs and herring, but hey, I'll try anything once.

Leaving Geysir we'll go to the Gullfoss waterfall which cascades 105 feet in two drops.  According to Wikipedia when you first approach the waterfall, it is obscured from view so that it looks like the river simply vanishes into the earth.

Upon leaving Gullfoss, we'll head to Eyjafjallajokul volcano.  (I know it looks like my cat jumped on my keyboard but that really is a word in Iceland apparently.)  This is the volcano that erupted in 2010 which generated the massive ash cloud that grounded flights to and from Europe.  Below is a photo of the eruption provided by National Geographic. Chances are it won't look exactly like this during our visit.

Following this stop, we will overnight in Vik the southernmost village in Iceland.  On Day 3 of our trip, we will head to the largest glacier in Europe.  Vatnajokull is located in the national park at Skaftafell and actually covers several volcanoes below the ice.  The average thickness of the glacier is 400 meters and it covers 8% of the country.  That is a lot of ice!

The amazing lake in the photo above is Lake Jokulsarlon where some of the scenes of the James Bond movie Die Another Day were filmed and we will be stopping here today.

Day 4 will be spent driving along the eastern coast of Iceland where the Irish missionaries first settled only 200 years ago.  Then we will stay in Egilsstadir.  Day 5 will be one of the most exciting days of the tour as we will be visiting Dettifoss and Lake Myvatn.  As you can see from the photos Dettifoss is just a little unassuming waterfall.  Oh, it also happens to be the most powerful waterfall in Europe.

Lake Myvatn was formed in a volcanic eruption 2300 years ago and was named for the millions of midges that fly around there in the summer months.  I guess Myvatn is the Icelandic word for midge.  It is known for it's huge waterfowl concentration.  And the river Laxa is known for it huge population of brown trout and Atlantic salmon.

Lake Myvatn

Before arriving in Akureyri on this night, we will visit Godafoss which is know as the waterfall of the Gods.  The awesome photo to the right was taken by Trey Ratcliff at Godafoss.  From this photo you can see why even with all the other amazing waterfalls in Iceland, this one is known as the waterfall of the Gods.

On Day 6 we'll have an orientation in Akureyri which is the capital of northern Iceland and then visit the Botanical Garden.  That will be followed by a drive to Hvammstangi where we will enjoy a seal watching trip by boat around Miofjorour which is included in the tour.  We will spend tonight on the west coast of Bogarnes.

On Day 7 we will stop in Thingvellir before returning to Reykjavik where we can spend the afternoon on our own followed by a farewell dinner.  The tour will end tomorrow following breakfast.  All breakfasts and dinners are included in the price of the package as well as all tours except for the Viking Horse Tour which I just thought would be fun.  The tour takes you around the entire country of Iceland missing nothing.

Tour prices start at $2,749 per person not including air.  There are still packages available for 2013 if you are interested in cooling off this summer, give me a call at Places You'll Go Travel 469-828-0254.

Graduation Trips!

Well, I got no pie over the weekend.  I hope you were more successful than me.  I've started this trend of going to my parents house on Thursday afternoon rather than waiting until Friday to avoid all of the heavy weekend traffic both coming into and going out of Dallas.  Then I come back on Saturday and still have Sunday to get things done.  Doing this I lose a day of work and you guys are deprived of one day of travel blog and I know how you look forward to my travel insights....  But it's a sacrifice we all must make for the family.  It's not like I go every week anyway.

My niece and I are beginning to talk about our travel plans for the summer.  For those of you who don't know me, I have four nephews and a niece.  Since I have no children of my own, I began a tradition when my oldest nephew graduated from high school of taking each of them on a trip.  Just me and the nephew or niece.  It's nice because I get to spend one last week with them just before they go off to college and I get to give them a graduation gift they will never forget.

For my oldest nephew Jacob, we went to New York for four or five nights.  I can't remember how many nights it was now but I think it was five.  It was a great trip.  Jacob is a huge baseball fan and he did one act play in high school so we went to a Yankees game at the old Yankee stadium, we went to a Mets game, in fact we were there on the 25th anniversary of their '86 World Series win and had to sit through the entire ceremony before watching the dumb Mets get smeared.  We both thought that game was the low light of the week and we are both avid Mets haters now.

We also went and saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway.  It was a great show.  We ate at the ESPN Zone in Times Square twice because once just wasn't enough.  We went up the Empire State Building at night.  After our play we had dessert at Sardi's which cost me more than most of our meals did for the week.  But it was something that Jacob wanted to do.  We rode the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty, we visited ground zero and spent most of a day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We went to a comedy club and just generally did whatever we wanted all week.  It was a good trip and I'll always treasure that time with Jacob.

For my second oldest nephew Matt, we decided to take a cruise out of Galveston.  It was the last summer that Royal Caribbean ran a ship out of Galveston during the summer which was in 2007.  Back then you could go on a cruise out of Texas in the summer time without fear of the ship breaking down in the middle of the trip resulting in being towed to Alabama, being flown back from St. Martin or just slowly missing two stops while creeping back from Grand Cayman on a crippled ship.  Yep, that was back in the day when a dependable cruise line sailed out of Galveston year round.  But I digress.....

Matt's cruise was on my favorite ship, Rhapsody of the Seas and stopped in Cozumel, Costa Maya, Progresso and Roatan.  That was my first trip to Roatan and when I discovered the greatness of that Honduran island.  Matt and I did excursions in each of our stops except Costa Maya.  At Costa Maya, there is this outdoor grass covered bar in the market area that we sat in for a few hours and drank a Sol while watching the people walk by and the partiers.  At Cozumel, we did a Jeep ride and beach snorkel.  It was the same as the Dune Buggy Beach Snorkel that I have done a couple of times except that the Jeep isn't as fun to drive.  At Roatan, we went to a resort called Paradise Island and spent the day snorkeling, kayaking and just laying around the beach.  In Progresso we went to the Chichen Itza ruins which I think are the best Mayan ruins in Mexico.  I don't recommend Progresso as a stop on a cruise.  It's not a resort type area.  It is very industrial and ugly.  The only excursion to do from there is the Chichen Itza ruins and even that is a long drive.  But the cruise out of Galveston was going there so we did it.  Again as with Jacob's trip, we both had a good time and I loved spending the week with Matt.

My third oldest nephew, Chris also chose a cruise for his trip.  We sailed out of New Orleans on NCL.  For those of you who haven't sailed on NCL, it is about like Carnival both in price and luxury or lack there of.  I recommend it over Carnival just because they seem to at least maintain their ships.  It's a viable option for Texans who want to take a less expensive summer cruise without having to fly to the embarkation port or drive for several days.  I drove to New Orleans on Saturday.  Chris flew in on Sunday since he came straight from his school's trip to Europe.  It was the "Summer of Chris", what can I say?  Unfortunately, all of my pictures of Chris's trip are on my old computer which is stored in a closet upstairs, so I can't share them with you.  Perhaps another time.

Our stops were Cozumel, Roatan and Belize.  We did excursions in each of our stops.  At Cozumel, we did a speed boat beach day in which Chris drove our two person speed boat.  It was a follow the leader type deal and it was fun if you don't normally get to ride in a boat.  We went to this beach where the greatest source of entertainment was a family who was on our excursion and fighting.  Chris really enjoyed it when the little girl told her dad she hated him.  The dad was a jerk and we were rooting for the little girl.  At Belize we did a Catamaran Sail and Snorkel.  It was good but rainy most of the time we were out.  After that excursion we went back to the ship and then tendered to shore to shop and have a beer.  At Roatan, we did a beach break and snorkel at a beach where the reef was about 10 feet off shore.  It was the best snorkeling of my life!  If I could have stayed there for weeks, I would have been happy.  As with the other two, we both had fun and it was great to spend the time with Chris.

So this summer it is Rebecca's turn.  I am steering her toward a cruise, because I think it will be the least expensive option.  But I also have started looking at a few all inclusives.  An all inclusive might actually be cheaper than a cruise depending on airfare since I would really rather not go on NCL and I will never board another Carnival ship.  Two years from now, my youngest nephew Tim will graduate and then I will be done with all of them.  I suppose I could start again with great nieces and nephews, which would mean that I might be trying to figure all of this out again in about 18 years.  If you have somebody graduating this summer, I highly recommend taking them away and spending time with just the two of you in a wonderful place that you will both always remember.  Have a good Monday!

A Little Texas Pi Day Road Trip

Well, it's Pi Day.... You know, like the number pi (3.14159265359), not the pastry pie.  So in honor of  3/14 or Pi Day, I'm celebrating the pastry rather than the number.  Because honestly, what kind of a geek would want to celebrate a number, for the love of Pete.....

So let's talk about the best places to go for a really great piece of pie.  Now, if you're asking me, the best place to go for a perfect piece of chocolate or coconut meringue pie is my Mom's house and back in the day my Grandma's house was a close second.  However, if you all show up at my Mom's house with forks in hand, she's probably going to get a little pissy and none of us wants to see that.  So I found an article from Southern Living on line that ranked the top 10 pie places in Texas and since it is going to be a perfect spring weekend in Texas, I thought what better way could my lovely readers spend their time than driving around the state conducting your very own pie tasting comparison.

Now I have to be honest, although I have lived in Texas all my life and I have lived in several different parts of Texas, there are still parts of the state that I either don't even know exist or just prefer not to visit.  So, although Southern Living ranked 10 in their article, I'm only going to give you information on the ones in locations that I think are worth your visit.  I mean let's face it how many of you are really willing to drive out to Medina this weekend to visit an orchard during it's off season?  None of you right?  So, I'm not going to tell you that the apple pies at the Love Creek Orchards in Medina were ranked #1 by Southern Living.  What sense would that make.  The fact that I had to Google Medina to even find it on a map is pretty telling, I think.

So moving along, you might be interested in visiting the Blue Bonnet Cafe in Marble Falls this weekend.  After all, the bluebonnets are blooming and you probably haven't tossed your kids in a bunch of them on the side of the highway in the last year for a photo op.  This weekend would be the perfect time to do it and there is no better place to do that than along Hwy 281 in Marble Falls.  Monday through Friday the Blue Bonnet Cafe has a pie Happy Hour from 3 - 5 p.m.  If you take off from work early tomorrow, you might be able to make that.  If you need a place to spend the night in Marble Falls after OD'ing on pie, check out the Bella Vista Bed and Breakfast for a relaxing evening of digesting your pie.

But wait, it gets better, because you could really make a big weekend out of your Pi Day celebration if you drove over to Stephenville and took Hwy 281 south stopping at Hico first.  You see, the #3 place in Texas for pie is the Koffee Kup Family Restaurant in Hico at the intersection of Hwy 281 and Hwy 6.  They also have great chicken fried steak but how could you expect anything less.  I mean, it is right smack dab in the middle of Texas.  So, okay, here's the new plan, you leave work early today.... head to Hico.  Get your pie on there.  Then you head on down to Marble Falls....   If you happen to lapse into diabetic coma after the pie from Hico, you can always stop in Lampasas for the night.  But I would recommend driving on to Marble Falls since you are going to have several more stops to make before the weekend is over.

I'm thinking now that you are going to have to eat your Marble Falls pie for breakfast or lunch because you've gotta get to Round Top before the Royers Round Top Cafe closes at 9:30 on Friday night for your second dose of pie of the day.  By the way, it is Antique Week in Round Top which is the smallest incorporated town in the state with a population of 77 people.  So, the website recommends that you make reservations at the cafe.  I'm just sayin'.....  I'm thinking that finding a place to spend the night in Round Top is going to be pretty tough unless you are related to one of the 77 residents.  So you might want to head down I-10 and look for a hotel room.  But don't go too far because tomorrow we are hitting our next stop in Chappell Hill.  If you find that getting to Round Top this weekend to celebrate Pi Day isn't going to be possible, worry not!  Today thru Sunday, on their website you can order a pie to be delivered to your home at a 25% savings because they know how to celebrate Pi Day at the Royers Round Top Cafe.

The next stop in our weekend of celebrating Pi Day is in Chappell Hill, Tx. at Bevers Kitchen.  We're in luck too!  Friday and Saturday are Mexican buffet days in the restaurant.  Be sure to check out the website for this place because the photos of the pies and bread are amazing!  After the Mexican buffet and a big old slice of pie you might want to walk it off at the Chappell Hill Lavender Farm which just opened a few weeks ago for the 2013 season.  You can cut your own lavender for $5 a bundle.

As you leave Chappell Hill, you will make your final stop in Brenham.  Now, I know what you're thinking.....  Whoa there Susan!!!!  It's Pi Day not Ice Cream Day!  But Brenham also happens to be the home to Must Be Heaven and yes, to answer your question it is indeed also an ice cream parlor selling Blue Bell Ice Cream.  The stop in Brenham will wrap our trip up.  But after 3 days of pie, we will need to get back home and head to the gym anyway.  So if you are still conscious after all of that pie, head on over to I-45 to drive back to the Dallas area and if you get hungry along the way, stop at Buck-ees for a little snack.  Yeah, that's right, I said it.

Have a good weekend.  I'll be in Nacogdoches.... eating pie at Mom's house.  I'll talk to you all on Monday.  Happy Pi Day!

What To Do With the Critters

Before I got Jingle, I always had tough street cats that had been converted for home use.  My first cat as an adult was Claire.  She was a scrapper.  She was a calico and she barely slowed down long enough to have three litters of kittens.  I kept one kitten from each of her first two litters.  My sister-in-law kept one from the second litter.  Overall, she had 9 kittens before I caught her one day, threw her in a cat carrier and took her to the vet to be fixed.  The kittens that I kept were Cosmo and Bob.

I got Claire while I was in college from a friend that I worked with.  When I got her, I lived in Nacogdoches and my parents lived in Bay City.  When Cosmo and Bob were born, I still lived in Nacogdoches.  So, for the first several years of each of their lives, the only traveling I did was when I went to my parents house for a weekend.  Since I always lived with one or both of my brothers from the time I got Claire for several years after, my cats never really had to be left home alone except when we all went to Bay City for an occasional holiday.  But even then, since we all had different work and school schedules my brothers and I would take different cars and leave and come home at different times.  So the cats were never left home alone for long - usually a day at the most.

You could always leave dry food and water out for them and they would be fine.  Eventually, my brothers both got married and moved out of our house and I moved into an apartment.  When I moved into the apartment I decided that three cats was too many for a one bedroom apartment, so Bob had to go live with my brother Ronnie and his wife Christina who lived out in the country so that he could continue to be a country outdoor cat.  I won't tell you that whole story now. But let's just say that the move didn't go too well for poor little Bob.  Cosmo, Claire and I all became apartment dwellers at that point and they never went outside anymore unless it was to sun themselves on a balcony or porch.

Claire lived to be 17 and Cosmo lived to be 15 before I lost them.  I took Claire to my parents house in Bay City once when I went for an extended stay before she had her first litter of kittens.  She went out in the backyard the first night and it took hours to find her again.  It was a big enough scare that I kept her in the house for the rest of the visit and never took her with me again.  Over the years I always just left my cats at home with big bowls of food and water and a dripping faucet in case they ran short and had a friend come over every other day or so to check on them, refill bowls and make sure that everything was okay.  My cat sitting expenses were non-existent.

Fast forward a number of years.  I now have Jingle who is 13 and I purchased from a breeder.  He is Burmese.  I don't know what you know about Burmese cats but I'll just tell you that they are people cats.  Most cats are very aloof and distant and if you don't know Jingle you might think that about him too.  But he requires daily human contact.  When there is no one around to make him nervous, he sits with me almost constantly.  He doesn't usually let me out of his sight when I am at home but for brief periods.  This is the cat who has forced me to follow him to his litter box on more than one occasion and wait for him while he does his business.  He's a people cat.  He demands attention.

Shiner is my 4 year old cat who I found in Shiner, Tx. as a kitten.  I am certain that he was feral when we found him and he was about 8 weeks old at the time.  So, we were probably his first human contacts.  I brought him home on Labor Day and he and Jingle were buddies by the end of that week.  Shiner has never spent a night outside of my house since.  These days, the only time I am not with my cats is for an occasional grocery run or when I leave town.  I tell you all of this not because I am switching from a travel blog to a cat blog.  I tell you because being a lover of travel and a lover of pets can be very difficult.

When Jingle was a kitten, I tried hiring young single people from work to come and stay at my house with him while I went out of town.  That didn't work well at all.  Young single people have no respect for your home.  I used to take him everywhere with me like he was a chihuahua or yorkie.  It worked okay for me, but my parents weren't really thrilled with me when I showed up at their house with my very vocal and high maintenance cat.  Cruise ships don't allow even the quietest, most well mannered cat on board so there was no way I'd be able to smuggle Jingle on a ship.  I left Jingle home alone once for two nights.  In the old days with Claire and Cosmo, that was just enough time for them to plan a party, invite some of the alley cats from the neighborhood over and don their kitty party hats for a big "Mom's Out of Town Kitty Bash".  But Jingle nearly lost it while I was gone.  When I got home he clung to me for hours and didn't stop crying for days.  I decided I couldn't leave him alone anymore.  By then, Mom and Dad had a cat of their own who could eat Jingle for a mid-morning snack and not even belch afterward.  So taking him to their house was no longer an option.

So, I found a pet sitting service.  I've been using Guardian Pet Sitters for about 10 years.  For much of that time, I have had the same pet sitter who comes to take care of my boys when I am away.  I can't say enough good things about Guardian.  I feel like my pet sitter actually knows my cats and understands their personalities.  Shiner never meets a stranger, but Jingle is reserved around people he doesn't know.  She knows that.  When a friend comes over to take care of my cats when I am only away overnight, I always get home and hear about how they never saw Jingle but Shiner greeted them at the door.  I understand that Jingle is shy around people he doesn't see all the time and it makes me sad to know that he had no human contact while I was gone, but I can't expect a friend to wait around for him to get comfortable with them.  When my pet sitter from Guardian comes to take care of them, Jingle comes out for her.  He knows her and is comfortable with her.  Shiner still meets her at the door.  But Jingle spends time with her as well and even lets her carry him around the house.

My favorite thing about Guardian is that if I ever have an emergency out of town, I can call them as I'm leaving town and they will start the service immediately.  They continue the service until I get home and call or text my pet sitter to let her know that I have arrived home and all is well.  If I had been on the Carnival Triumph's cruise to hell, I would be perfectly comfortable knowing that my cats would be taken care of until the floating sewer returned to shore and I made my way home.  I like having that peace of mind when I travel.  One of my favorite things about using Guardian is coming home and reading the notes that my pet sitter leaves for me.  She writes a daily log of her visits and comments on what she and the cats did during each visit.  Sometimes I get notes from the cats.  If one of them has coughed up a furball, I know from her notes what day it occurred on.  Oh, and by the way, she cleans up after them, sweeps up cat litter that has been tracked through the house and picks up cat toys.  So, usually when I get home, the house is slightly cleaner than it was before I left.

So, in case you are planning on a trip anywhere soon whether I'm booking it for you or not and you live in the Collin County area you might check out the Guardian Pet Sitters website.  I highly recommend them.  Happy travels!

10 Signs That Summer is NOT That Far Away

Right now I could use a little bit of hope that it will be summer soon.  I hate it when the high temperature for any day is below 60 degrees.  It's hard to deal with as a Texan.  Summer is the time for vacations, pools, fun with friends.  It is basically the season that we all work so hard all year to get to.  So, I thought today you could use a list that might help you to identify the coming of summer....

10.  The girl in the cubicle next to yours is on the phone for countless hours everyday making plans for Cinco de Mayo.

9.  The top 5 recent searches on your work computer are various combinations of the words Resort - All Inclusive - Beaches.

8.  Gas prices are the highest they have been in the last year.

7.  Memorial Day movie trailers are starting up and there is at least one worth seeing.

6.  The seven day forecast contains at least one day next week in which the temperature will rise above 75 degrees.

5.  Azalea Trails have started up all over East Texas.

4.  The first kids in bluebonnets on the side of the interstate photo was posted on Facebook yesterday.

3.  In one week, I went from filling my bird feeder every two weeks to filling my bird feeder every two days.

2.  Jimmy Buffett tickets have been purchased.

1.  I woke up before the cats today!

Happy Tuesday!

Time is a Mother!

Did you think I had dropped off the face of the earth?  Nah!  I just went to Nacogdoches for a few days.  I didn't mention it before I left since it was all conditional on whether or not the plumber finally got my leaky faucet in the master bathroom repaired.  Did you ever have a leaky faucet that was so leaky, you were afraid to leave home for more than an hour or two at a time?  That's where I was.  So, all's well.  The faucet is fixed, I got to go to a Ladyjack and then a Lumberjack basketball game.  I got to go see my nephew, Tim kick some butt in baseball on Friday.  Then Saturday I got to drive the tractor moving dead trees at my parents house.

None of that is my topic today.  My topic concerns time.  It is top of mind simply due to the start of Daylight Savings Time which began very early in the morning on Sunday.  It messes me up.  It resulted in my sleeping until after 10 yesterday morning.  This morning I even overslept.  You see, I normally set an alarm for 8 on weekdays and forgot to last night.  About 10 minutes after getting in bed last night I remembered.  But there was already a cat laying across me and I was really tired, so I convinced myself that my cats would wake me up this morning.  They normally have very good body alarms that wake them up at the same time every day.  The issue is that no one told them about Daylight Savings Time.  So, they woke me up at 9.

I love this time of year when it stays light later.  It is conducive to getting outside and actually doing something.  I like that!  Not that I'm inclined to get outside and do something when it is this cold.  But you know if it warms up and the weather is perfectly clear, I'm in!  What I don't like is the time change itself.  Why can't we just keep Daylight Savings Time all year?  It would be so much more pleasant if you could drive home from work at night in December and it didn't always look like it was midnight, right?  But I'm proposing keeping Daylight Savings Time year around just because I don't like the clock changes and my body doesn't deal well with it.  It's all personal for me.  It's going to take me at least a week to find and change every clock in my house.  Part of that is due to the constant state of exhaustion that I am experiencing because the time changed by one hour.  Based on my bodies response, you would think that we lost a day or two rather than an hour.

I don't deal well with time changes, I never have.  But it is strange.  It doesn't seem to matter which direction I travel, only the trip home gives me jet lag.  How can that be?  I think it has to do with adrenaline and my excitement of arriving in a new place.  I can give you examples.  It happens to me no matter where I go.

Once I left Dallas at 2 or 3 in the afternoon heading to Spain with a 4 hour layover in Amsterdam.  I slept for about 4 hours the night before the flight, then worked half a day before leaving.  On the airplane, I had an entire row of seats to myself so that I could lift the armrests and lay down.  I took a Unisom to try to make me sleep during flight.  I was able to sleep for a total of about 1 hour during that flight and that one hour was interrupted several times.  Once we were on the second (fully loaded) flight from Amsterdam to Barcelona I was finally able to go to sleep leaning against the window but it was a very short flight, so I might have slept for another hour.  When we finally got to Barcelona, I was pumped and ready to go sightseeing.  I could probably have gone all night long.  After that trip, I came home, slept all night long, then brought a blanket and pillow downstairs and slept for about 12 more hours on my couch.  So, in that instance when I traveled East over the Atlantic, the time change didn't affect me.  But when I came back West coming home, I was exhausted and slept for nearly 24 hours straight to recover.

This other time, I went to Hawaii.  I was concerned that I would be exhausted when I got there since I was going West and I remembered what coming back from Europe had done to me.  If you have ever flown from Dallas to Hawaii on American, you have had the same flight experience that I did.  You get on an airplane in the morning in Dallas and fly all day.  Perhaps you change planes on the west coast but you aren't off the plane for long.  Then you arrive on Oahu at 3 or 4 in the afternoon.  When we got to Oahu, I was pumped.  There was surf, there was sunshine, there were fish to be eaten and Mai Tai's to be consumed.  I had no time for sleep and fortunately, I wasn't the least bit tired.  We had a great time for more than a week and even spent a day over at the Big Island.  I was never even a little tired from all of the time zones we went through getting to Hawaii.  Then we came home.  Again, if you have ever been to Hawaii on American, you have also experienced the red eye coming home.  You board the plane around 4 in the afternoon, travel all night long and arrive back in Dallas around 7 a.m.

I could barely drag my butt off of that plane.  It didn't help that I came down with a cold during flight.  When I got home, I once again drug a pillow and blanket downstairs which apparently is my custom after a long flight and slept on my couch for the rest of the day.  Fearing that I wouldn't be able to sleep that night and knowing that I had to work the next day, I forced myself to get up around 6 that evening.  Then I went to bed around 10 and slept until my alarm went off the following morning.  That time I was traveling East.

So you see my confusion in figuring out what causes jet lag.  Is it just the fact that there is a time change or does the time change have to be in one direction or the other and if so, why doesn't my body recognize this?  And really???  Can simply moving my clock backward by one hour also cause jet lag?  Seriously, if I am going to feel this way after a long weekend, I would like to be posting pictures of some exotic location that I spent time at this morning rather than a few photos of my nephew catching a Nacogdoches Dragons baseball game and the scoreboard at a Lumberjack game.  But that is all I have to show for my weekend.  So, I will end now.  Maybe I should go upstairs and get my pillow and a blanket so that I can spend the day on the couch recovering from this horrific time change.

Have a good week.

Ahhhh.... Oasis!

A friend of mine is heading out on a Spring Break cruise next week.  They are going on Oasis of the Seas out of Fort Lauderdale.  To say I am jealous would be a huge understatement.  This will be their first time on an Oasis class ship.  I've never been on one.  I have dreamed about it so much that you would think I had spent a lot of time on Oasis class ships but not so much.

Oasis is currently the largest class of cruise ships at sea.  There are only two Oasis class ships right now.  The other is Allure of the Seas.  Although RCI has begun design on a third ship in the class it is not expected to come out until 2016 after the first ship in the next class is launched in late 2014.  Oasis ships are big, very big.  Let me explain to you how big.

According to the 2010 census, the population of Childress, Tx. was 6,105.  Oasis of the Seas carries 6,296 guests.  Serving those guests and manning the ship are 2,165 crew members.  The population of San Augustine, Tx. is 2,108.  This means that you could empty Childress and San Augustine, load all of the residents of both towns onto buses, drive them to Florida and load them onto the ship, then still have room left over for my entire family, many of my Facebook friends and a few other select people that I would probably have to hand pick. The problems that you would face of course would be do you really want to spend time at sea with the populations of Childress, San Augustine and my family.  I guess it would all come back to what I always say when someone asks if I could be on such and such ship for 7 days with so and so....  "As long as I have a balcony.... yeah, I could do it."

The other issue would be that if you wanted an experienced crew you know that wouldn't run the ship aground or catch it on fire and would clean your cabin everyday you'd probably have to send San Augustine back home and keep the actual Royal Caribbean crew on board.  So, honestly, only Childress is going on this cruise with me if I ever hijack Oasis.  I don't actually know anyone from Childress, but I'm sure they are nice people and we would all get along well.  After all, my grandmother was born there and she was a nice person.  So, I am sure that the people who live there now, 100+ years later are all just like her.  They probably all would enjoy hugging me and make really good chocolate and coconut pies and are competitive as hell.  It's a wild assumption, but I am certain that it is accurate.

Getting back to Oasis, the ship has many extraordinary features.  You have probably heard about a lot of them if you are into cruising at all.  For instance, it is the first ship at sea with a living park.  The Central Park neighborhood contains 12,175 plants, 56 trees and bamboo.  (I don't know why they felt the need to throw the bamboo in on their fact sheet but since they obviously felt it was pertinent information, I'm passing it on to you.)  Oasis has 4 swimming pools and 10 whirlpools.  In a 24 hour period it's passengers consume 4.7 million pounds of fresh water.  I'm not sure why the fact sheet I have measured water in weight rather than gallons.  But that's the information I got, so you are going to have to deal with it.  I'm sure that if I really wanted to Wow you I could find a site on the internet that would translate that weight into gallons, but I'll just leave that for you to do at your own convenience.  Maybe it will give my friend and her family something to do later this week as they drive to Florida to board the ship.  It would be a nice little math project for the girls.  But regardless of whether the water is in gallons or pounds, it's a bunch of water.

There is an AquaTheater on board that is home to what are apparently some amazing diving and synchronized swimming performances.  The artist rendition above is apparently what it would look like during a performance.  There are two Flowriders and two rock climbing walls and a zip-line nine decks in the air.  There is a Rising Tide Bar that moves from one deck to another as you sit at the bar.  I guess if you sit down at that bar, you could get lost if you have too many martinis and get off at the wrong floor.  They have a Broadway caliber performance during each cruise.  My friend and her family will be seeing Hairspray on board Oasis during their cruise.  There is a Boardwalk area which contains a full size carousel.  It is pictured below.

Rising Tide Bar

Boardwalk

Dr. Quinn at the ships Christening

In addition to all of these exciting things, there are 46 wheelchair accessible staterooms on board.  All of this plus, Dr. Quinn is the godmother of the ship.  What more could you possibly want?  So, I hope you will join me in being jealous of my friend who will spend an entire week on this floating city.  Maybe when they return I'll have more to tell you about Oasis.  Have a good Wednesday!