Well, I am ChatKat (Kathy) from Ca. I have been lurking and occasionally posting on the cruise chat boards since my Panama Canal Cruise last year.
Thank you, Ngaire, for putting this board together. I sense that you are a very special lady from the posts I have read about you. I am very thrilled to get to know many of you through the board and eventually on board!

I am late 40's and a California Native. My first husband hated to travel since he was a salesman. Nearly all of our vacations were beach vacations. I got him to cruise the weekend cruises a few times and I was hooked and wanted more. So I divorced him! (Well, really not because of that!)

Frank has 3 grown children and I have a step daughter from my 1st marriage with twin granddaughters. My current children are the furry kind - a pound rescue name Gizmo and a Cairn Terrier (like Toto) named Daisy.

When I remarried in 1997, Frank suggested a two week cruise for our honeymoon and I was in heaven. We've cruised each year and this year we will cruise twice. We met on the internet we married within a few months of meeting. I think the only lie he has ever told was that he was 10 years younger then he really was in order to meet me. He is a CPA and I have a bookkeeping/financial consulting business. I joke that if he didn't like me when we met, that maybe we'd refer business to one another. We really had so much in common and we are perfect lifemates.

Anyway, we were looking for our next vacation when our TA sent us a brochure with a two for one and inaugural sailing on the Mariner to Alaska. Frank has travelled extensively so I try to plan trips to places he has not been so we will both have the thrill of new adventures. It was six star and the price and dates were right. We thought it'd be a one time thing on RSSC because even at half price it was still costly and over budget. So we changed the budget instead. We'd taken a cruise on the Millennium after our RSSC experience and decided that we liked RSSC so much, we'd have to make that our regular cruise line. We usually take 2 or 3 trips a year.