This is our 31st cruise, a substitute for a different cancelled cruise this fall. We have taken several cruises to the Caribbean over the years; it was hard to find one with stops at different places, which this one has. My thanks to Patty for arranging this cruise and for picking the best cabin on the ship for us.

I have found it helpful for me to record interesting things that we did, or things about the cruise experience, as soon as I could after they happened. So, this will be my log of the trip, with notes about what we did and what was going on around the ship.

Thursday - September 12
With just 30 days to go, I finally finished the itinerary page today. It now includes all the normal stuff and the descriptions for the shore excursions that we have selected.

Wednesday - October 9
What luck. With less than a week to go, we get hit with hurricane Milton. Monday and Tuesday this week were filled with hurricane preparations - shopping, installing boards on the windows, checking out the generator, charging all devices. This day started cloudy and rainy and went downhill from there. Before the day was done there were winds reported in St. Petersburg over 100 MPH, and I recorded over 14 inches of rain on my outside gauge. The power failed around 7 pm, so we were in the dark all night. The good news is that there is nothing that prevents us from cruising in a few days. We have just lost a bunch of preparation time.

Thursday - October 10
I forgot to mention that one of the preparation steps was to buy a new 5-gallon gas can and fill it with gas for the generator. That's a good thing because even though there might have been gas around to be bought, none of the stations nearby had the power to pump the gas, so no one was buying gas anyway. It is a slow day with some rain and lots of wind from the storm. The generator is running fine, keeping the refrigerator and TV on during daylight hours. Most of the day was spent in front of the TV watching weather and news reports about the storm.

Friday - October 11
Better weather today, day 2 on the generator. Patty and I had a discussion regarding going on this cruise and concluded that neither of us wanted to be on a cruise when power was restored to our dark houses.

Saturday - October 12
Patty had power restored this morning after about 2.5 days. I am still dark. Patty called Princess and told them we would not be on the cruise. This is day 3 on the generator, which allowed me to watch some college football. I went out this afternoon and sat in a gas line for an hour and a half, but I did get more generator gas.

Sunday - October 13
Generator day 4. Yard cleanup today.

Monday - October 14
Around 8:30 this morning, my power was restored. Now I get to catch up on stuff I didn't do for the last 4.5 days.

The Following Days
We were able to recover almost all of the money spent on the cruise we did not take. And Patty found a good cabin on the Ruby Princess, cruising from San Francisco to Hawaii during the last two weeks of this year. So we have a replacement cruise booked already, continuing our cruising history. This one will be better than the one we cancelled. I'll have a new log for that cruise.

Thanks for having a look at the log.