The Coundown Begins – Three Days Until Vacation

As someone who owns their own company (two different companies, actually), the 4 weeks leading up to a vacation are always so stressful.

I’m a web designer and developer with a healthy client roster and they all demand and deserve my personal attention. Trying to get all of my work buttoned up before I disappear for two weeks is always a challenge. WiFi on cruise ships is expensive and very unreliable and cell phone coverage while at sea is basically non-existent. Even if I did take calls, I don’t bring my laptop with me so I wouldn’t be much help in the case of a client emergency.

All this means that I have to do a lot of pre-planning, anticipating anything and everything that might go wrong. I make backups of all their projects and burn them to DVDs so they have them in case they need to make changes, in addition to backing everything up to external hard-drives to an off-site location. All this takes time. Plus, as soon as a client hears that I am going on vacation, all of a sudden those, ‘low-priority-no-hurry’ projects magically transform into “OMG-this-is-mission-critical’ items that need to be done immediately, before I leave.

I also am co-founder of 24PageBooks.com, a venture-funded eBook publishing company that we’re just getting off the ground, so I now have shareholders to answer to.

I’ve been putting in 12-hour days for the last 4 weeks and I cannot wait to get out-of-dodge and over to the Caribbean for a couple of weeks.

This Year It’s an Eastern Caribbean Princess Cruise!

While we were perfectly happy with our Royal Caribbean Cruise experiences for the last two trips, we couldn’t find a Royal Caribbean Cruise itinerary this year that hasn’t gone to places that we’ve already visited. So this year we’re rolling the dice on a new cruise line and booked a cruise with Princess Cruise Lines. 10 days of cruising the Caribbean aboard the Emerald Princess!

Here’s where we are going!

Cruise Schedule:
February 16	Fort Lauderdale, Florida (depart at 5pm)
February 17	Princess Cays, Bahamas (In port from 9am-4pm)
February 18	Cruising at Sea
February 19	St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (In port from 8am-6pm)
February 20	Antigua, Antigua and Barbuda (In port from 8am-5pm)
February 21	St. Lucia (In port from 8am-6pm)
February 22	Barbados (In port from 7am-4pm)
February 23	St. Kitts, St. Kitts & Nevis (In port from 9am-6pm)
February 24	Fort Lauderdale, Florida (In port 6:30am)
February 25	At Sea
February 26	At Sea
February 27	Fort Lauderdale, Florida (In port 7am)