Finishing the Loop #1

After the Blount cruise last June, we decided that it was worthwhile enough to warrant booking on their Savannah to Baltimore cruise in April 2019 and thus complete our Great Loop, since Savannah was where we had to stop and ship LK home back in 2013. We also received a 20% discount for booking within 3 weeks of our last cruise, so we went ahead and booked in August. We worked out an itinerary that will include the cruise, followed by a road trip up through New Jersey to New England, returning through Pennsylvania and the Virginias, then back to Washington DC where we will spend 5 days at the Smithsonian - something we have been promising ourselves to do since we first went there in 1989 and found 2 days wasn't enough to see it all. We then fly back to Los Angeles and home. At the end of this trip, there will only be 6 States in the USA that I will not have visited (Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Nth Dakota and Oregon).

Not quite "crossing our wake", but almost. We will be "cruising" the New Jersey coast by car, rather than by boat, but that is the only non-boating part of the Loop, and we made up for that by doing West Lake Michigan twice! I also get to see where Loopy Kiwi was built,  although Silverton aren't there (or anywhere else) any more, for that matter. We will also get to see Mark Twains's house, Mt Washington and its Cog railway, the Martin Guitar factory in Nazareth and visit the Amish in Lancaster, PA (something Carolyn wants to do). There are also plenty of military establishments, historical and Civil War sites to visit during the cruise.

We made the airline bookings through Air New Zealand and, despite the hassles with United as explained in the last posting on this blog, we decided to use them for the internal sectors in the USA. We figured that, because the baggage problem we had was a "one-off" it was worth the risk as it surely would not happen again??? WRONG!!! All the documentation from Air NZ showed us with a baggage allowance of 2 bags per sector each, but when we looked at the United confirmation, it showed an allowance of only 1 bag on the flight from Washington DC to LA. Long story short... I have contacted United and Air NZ numerous times by email and phone, and everyone agrees that the Air NZ baggage allowance should apply (ie 2 bags/person). However at the time of writing this, the United confirmation still states only 1, and that is what the system will see we we come to check in at Dulles airport. Suffice to say, I will be ready for a scrap this time, and they won't get away with ripping us off again (and the charge is an extra $250 per bag this time!). Watch this space.