Booking a cruise on Vacations To Go is deceptively easy, especially for a total beginner like me. You find a cruise you like, copy down its' I.D. Number and call someone in Atlanta (I'm guessing...it's somewhere down that way judging by the accent of the very nice lady who answered), with your Visa card in your hot little hand. You tell her what kind of cabin you want, she confirms it's available, you give her your card details, you're done. A confirming email will soon be sent. Wow, you're a cruiser in ten minutes. And you've saved a ton of money because VacToGo does discount a lot.
What she didn't tell you but the email did, is that VacToGo sells and guarantees a room in your preferred category, not a specific room with a number that you can find on a deck plan. That detail isn't given to you until a few days before you sail and by that time you're pretty well stuck with what they give you. That may be fine for the majority of passengers but in our case it was definitely not because we had purchased TWO cabins, and requested that they be near each other. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what a big company like P&O might do with a request like ours.
But they surprised us! They sent us the final room assignments a week before we flew out and amazingly enough, they were quite close to each other. Not adjacent, but close enough, on the same deck even. Happy, happy.
Fast forward three days. Oops, head office had made a boo-boo.
I have to back up and explain something here. Our cruise was really two cruises back-to-back. The first leg sailed from Southampton to Genoa. The second sailed seamlessly from Genoa to Venice. P&O had assumed, without really looking  at our booking, I guess, that we had only wanted the first leg, disembarking at Genoa. So, because we wanted to go all the way to Venice, they could no longer offer us the cabins we had been given, due to a previous commitment to people embarking at Genoa (a.k.a. Full paying passengers).
A flurry of emails and calls between us and VacToGo and between VacToGo and P&O resulted only in a promise that they would do their best to assign us two cabins close to each other but that they could not do that until very close to the day of sailing. So we flew out of Vancouver without knowing our cabin assignments, trusting that they would live up to their promise...

The first thing we did was to list places we would like to see and things we would like to do. Separately. Then we compared lists and came up with our top wishes: London, the Cotswolds, Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Rome, Venice and Paris. And a cruise. Then we started thinking. We had to be BACK in six weeks, in relatively good shape (not totally exhausted), ready for chemo.
Time to rethink strategy.
London was a given. Not only is it a great city worthy of a visit anytime, Carol lived and worked there before emigrating to Canada. So a bit of a homecoming. Good so far.
Ok, it seemed sensible to fly in and out of London but what about the rest? What if a cruise could connect some of the other cities? Hmmm...
I've never been on a cruise so imagine my surprise when I was told about Vacations To Go! My head was spinning for days. And, because our timing was exquisitely lucky, we found a P&O repositioning cruise leaving Southampton about the right time and finishing in Venice. Perfect.
So the cruise became the driver of our trip. We would fly to London four days before it started and book time in Venice after, with one more stop before flying home. The cruise was 17 days and included some of the cities on our initial list so the final stop became a choice between Madrid and Paris. We had never been to either so we chose Paris because we were feeling romantic. And because the connections were easier.
There you go. Itinerary set. Easy peasy. All in a day's work. What could go wrong?

By way of introduction, the next dozen or so blogs are gonna be a trip down memory lane, sort of. They will describe our 2015 trip to Europe, organized, booked and taken in a matter of weeks. You see, in late February of that year I was told by my Oncologist that it was time to start chemo treatments for my CLL because the numbers were getting out of control. Although this was not devastating news, it meant I would not be able to travel for the six months that the treatments would take. So I negotiated a start date with my doctor that would allow a quick trip across the pond before the first needle went in, literally. I was told that we had to be back by mid April.
Little did I know how easily a quick trip can become a major production. All you need to do is say... "We might as well go there. It looks really close on the map."