Salty Zebra

  I love cruising, in case you hadn't already guessed. When I board a cruise ship, it feels like I'm coming home in the best possible way. I sleep better. I feel better. I eat better. Cruising is my happy place. And the beach house , that too 😉. I just love being on or near the water. I love the sound of the ocean and the way the ship moves on it. I even enjoy rough seas - until I don't. Nothing on earth is perfect! So in this season of uncertainty with my husband out of work, how am I going about planning, or even hoping for time on the water? Very carefully!   I'm in an interesting spot of not knowing. I don't know when my husband will get a new job, or what it will be like. In the past, he's been able to work from wherever we're at, so planning a trip wasn't as tricky. He'd just bring his computer and his headset, and we'd go. Now I don't know if he'll work remotely or in an office or even in a hybrid situation. I'm not sure what ...

  Did you know that you could cruise to places other than Alaska out of the Northwest? It's true! Most, but not all of these cruises are repositioning ones bringing the ship to the Northwest for the Alaska Season in the Spring and then moving them on to their next destination in the Fall. A few of them are actually roundtrip out of the Northwest to other Pacific locations. Let's break down the options available to you!  The easiest way to catch a cruise is to hop right on a ship near you. There are over 700 cruises leaving Seattle, WA and Vancouver BC in 2026, but as you guessed it, the vast majority of these are Alaskan cruises. I cannot encourage you enough to take one of these, I do almost every year, but sometimes you'd like to try something different. I get that because I do to! The good news is that about 100 of these cruises go to destinations other  than Alaska, so you have lots of places you can travel to. Have you ever wanted to go to Hawaii, but can't stomach...

  Now that I've fulfilled my major bucket list trip taking my family to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where are my dreams taking me? To Australia of course! The land down under has been beckoning me for a really long time, but I never thought of it as being a realistic possibility until recent years. And now my health is getting more challenging, so its possibility seems less and less likely. If this is going to happen, I'm going to have to be really creative !  The first barrier to visiting Australia is the extremely long plane flight . The average flight time is around 18 hours, with some being as long as 35-40 hours with various layovers. I really struggle with the 6ish hour flight to Florida, so I can't imagine how my body would hold up with this! I decided that if I was to fly, I would need to do it in business class, ideally in a lay-flat seat. As you can imagine, this is no small expense, running upwards of $8,000 per person round trip. Since I'd need to...

   I was shocked and thrilled when I learned a few years ago about Norwegian's Shareholder Benefits program. This is not something that is widely advertised, so just in case you hadn't heard about it either, I thought I ought to let you know!   The way this program works is that if you hold at least 100 shares of Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) stock, you can apply for an onboard credit for every  cruise you take with Norwegian, Oceania or Regent cruise lines. Don't own 100 shares of NCL? If you cruise with them regularly, maybe you should! In March of 2020, I made my first stock purchase recommendation to my husband. I had read several articles that really resonated with me regarding how solid NCL was in their savings and assets and predicted that they would be the most likely cruise line to weather the Covid storm. We jumped in and were fortunate to be able to purchase stock at $11.11 per share. I was simply investing in a company that I appreciated and had good ...

  Did you know that you could pay for a cruise with bank points? No, they don't transfer to a cruise line's program, but that didn't stop me!  Ok, if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty excited about this! With the changes in my husband's job situation, our budget has seen some significant changes and I was concerned that I wouldn't get to go on cruises anymore. But thanks to Katie's Travel Tricks , I've learned a great work-around. This won't fund everything  I want to do, but it's a great start and I have hopes to learn and earn more options!  So, as I've mentioned before, you can pretty much always convert your points to cash or use them to pay off charges on your card at a $0.01 per point rate. That's not nothing, and if you've got a million points, that might be a good way to go for you. But I wanted to do more with my points, I want them to work for  me. Enter the Chase Aeroplan card. I had learned about this card over the spring...