Happy Friday to all of you..... My husband DAvid and I live in South Barrington Illinois, a suburb of Chicago (about 30 minutes on a good day to our favorite micro brewery Goose Island in the city). We have been married nearly 17 years, and are planning on celebrating on a back to back on the diamond leaving June 21. We were on the Voyager last September, and had the most wonderful time. We could not get over the feeling of some of our wonderful friends that we met, STAYING on for 7 more days, that we said our next trip would be a back to back, so we could relish that wonderful sensation, of saddness saying goodbye, but glee that we had another week!

On that trip we spend most of our time with a wonderful couple that were childhood friend of Captain Dag, in fact they were the artist couple that created the lovely sculpture of the fish over the pool area. We plan to visit them on a scandanavian cruise in the next few years.

David and I have what i would consider a wonderful life. We work very very hard, he is a V.P. world wide sales, which means he travels for businesss much more than we would choose, but in our late 40's we hope that "this too will pass". I work for a company based in Dallas Texas ( I swear I am going to stop in and actuall meet Ngaire sometime soon), we manufacture a very interesting product that detects impact in shipping i.e. if something fragile is being shipped this product will detect rough handling. I have been selling this for nearly 11 years, and cover 7 states. We have 2 boys, one living in Hawaii, married to a beautiful Japanese girl Mariko, and our youngest son Adam will marry in Sept. and live nearl Langely Virginia.

Each and every time we cruise (we are really novices, Renaissance, Seaborn,and Radisson, oh, one really awful "big red boat" thing i will not discuss) we always think we want to spend all of our time together, tables for two etc. We miss each other so much because of our travel, we are nearly giggling on the plane. However, we always meet such nice people we make wonderful friends, some from 3 years ago, we see every year.

I have mentioned before that we have benefited from wonderful insights from the cruise boards. We really have. I would encourage anyone, active or "learning" to participate to educate yourself. It truly is valuable.

Thank you, and happy sailing..............