Friday, January 3, 2025
I guess you would call it Day -1. Tomorrow at this time we will be in the car on our way to Fort Lauderdale. Today has already been a little hectic. Michelle got me up. Before she left, she helped Mary clean out the refrigerator and cabinet where we kept canned goods. Basically, anything that was not expired went with Michelle. Anything that expired went in the garbage. I did not see what was put in each pile, but I'm pretty sure Michelle got a boat load. I'm not complaining. I'm glad that it will be used.
I had hand therapy this morning. That was uneventful. We drove back home. I looked at my e-mail and found that one of the pictures we submitted for our New Zealand visa was not accepted. This comes after about two hours of work yesterday to get the Australia and New Zealand visa applications submitted. Now we have to go do New Zealand picture again.
Yesterday, I realized I did not have an account that had $1000 in it so we could get cash. One of the early excursions requires cash. Because I prepaid all the credit cards and early bills, there was not $1000 left for us to get cash from Chase. So, lying in bed last night I came up with a plan. I put the plan into action the first thing after I got up. Mary will stop at Chase on her travels today. Another minor crisis averted.
I set up the headset that I'm using now. That went pretty quickly. I had to set the schedule for the shades. I went around and made sure all the internal cameras were pointed where I wanted them to be pointed. There are two cameras outside I must figure out if I'm going to leave them out there or not.
Mary had four stops today. The first was the bank to get the money. We decided on $2000. After that, she went and got gas to fill up the car. Lastly, she stopped at Publix. She bought a bag of salad. While she was there, she picked up fried chicken for me. My last hurrah. How much she is in her brown chair taking a break. She is convinced she can get everything in the car. We will do a dry run this afternoon. I'm less confident, but I’m willing to be wrong.
I've been racking my brain trying to think of things that need to be done before we go. We are, literally, in the final hours. I know there are Air tags that need to be set up yet. I want to test the GoPro camera. I have to decide which computing devices I'm going to take. I will probably take both laptops and one iPad. I have to remember that we are gone for four months. I will take another run at downloading movies to my iPad. I want to check and see what music I have on my phone.
It's 2:00 in the afternoon. I will try to update this note before I go to bed and post it. It is now 8:30 in the evening. Air tags are set up. Mary is putting them in bags that do not have them yet. I will have to update find my phone next. I verified that the credit cards can be used internationally. I tried to set up Verizon, but I might require a phone call. I wandered around the Princess website when it dawned on me, we should print the boarding passes. On the website I could not find anything about boarding passes. I remember seeing something on Mary's Princess app, when I realized I do not have my own princess login. I probably did years ago, but I couldn't remember what login ID or anything. I ended up calling Princess who pretty quickly got my ID back up and running. I then asked him about the boarding passes. You took him for the next 45 minutes to figure this out. Actually, I think I figured it out. The boarding pass tab was buried to the right of a different tab. There was nothing indicating you needed to scroll right. So, basically, I tripped across it. We redid the pictures that New Zealand needed for the visas. Mary is confident she's going to fit everything in the car. She's busy right now cleaning out the refrigerator. We have about an hour. I'm going to post this entry.
Tomorrow, our adventure truly starts. Hopefully, in 48 hours my anxiety level will drop to zero or less than zero. I probably mentioned this before, but we have a few go or no go points. Obviously, getting to Fort Lauderdale is a big step. Once we get to Fort Lauderdale, we get to drop all of our stuff off. They have dinner planned for those people going on the world cruise. Mary said there are 20 in Fort Lauderdale and another 13 in Los Angeles. On Sunday, when we get on the ship and we hope that our 10 pieces of luggage make it a board. Mary has 4 suitcases and four plastic bins. We each have a backpack.