What fun! I'll weigh in here as one of the "elders" of the entire group.

Mark and I have been married 23 years, and it's not the first time for either of us, so I can't claim that he swept me up out of nursery school. The fact that I have a 40-year-old daughter would shoot my claim down, too.

I also have a son who's almost 35, Mark's three are 34, 31, and 28 (two of them are choosing not to speak to us right now, and with the histrionic personalities involved, that's not a bad thing at all). My daughter has three children, 10 1/2, almost 8, and just 2 (she was a surprise, but a fun one).

When we got married, we had both been previously married to people who just "didn't get" the itchy feet that we had, so we set out to make up for the lacks of the years before. We did two Windjammer cruises right away, but other than that, we preferred to fly to an island and stay there. In 1989, we went to Fiji and stayed on Turtle Island (where both "Blue Lagoon" movies were filmed) for a week. That was an adventure, and we wanted to bring the entire staff home with us. We had planned a return trip for four years ago, but American Express PTS dropped the ball on us, and we just cancelled the trip. Our replacement trip was the Mariner to Alaska. Once on RSSC, there's no other line to look at.

We had cruised RCCL four or five times, including taking the kids on one ship with us (that was a disaster, think keystone kops). We also have done land-based trips with them, and will continue to do that while the kidlets prefer WDW to anything else. The older two are travel veterans, Sarah has a little way to go.

Voyager this past December was a spur-of-the-moment booking and we loved it. The other MINT, we had booked before the first MINT group formed, and decided to stay with the 10-day itinerary. Besides, both our birthdays fall during that 10-day period.

I'm yearning for a British Isles trip in 2005.

Mark is a roofing contractor on his second "go-round". He sold a really big company that he had built from the ground up, and started a smaller one. It was supposed to stay small, but he can't seem to keep that thought in his head. Whatever makes him happy. I stay home and spend money.

(It's lovely to spot spelling errors 12 hours later, and still be able to edit!)