So a couple of days ago I gave you the first half of how we wound up in the travel business…this fast. As I mentioned in my first “How did this happen” post, we were just going to start training last January and Kathleen might get into the actual business in March or April and I would follow when my time with my other business was over in two or three or more years. But a year ago, on Christmas Eve (2017), we met two of our favorite people for breakfast at my favorite breakfast place, Lola in downtown Seattle.

First let me introduce these two guys—Seth and Jason. We first met Seth on Twitter about six years ago when he moved from Eugene to Seattle to become the morning weather person on KOMO television news. From the start he would talk about cruising and traveling on the air so we started following each other on Twitter and then he followed us and we began a dialogue that led to a friendship. In the morning when I would ride my exercise bike, Seth and I would text back and forth with Seth about cruising and travel because I might have been the only person texting him at 4:30 am. We had never met but we were becoming friends.

In November 2014 we (Kathleen and I) went on our second Panama Canal cruise with our buddies the Martini Mates. When we arrived in our stateroom on Celebrity’s Infinity in Fort Lauderdale we found two bottles of wine. One was from our travel agent at the time (the amazing Norma Jean) and the other was from Seth. He had tracked us down, ordered wine and had it delivered to us…and we had never even met him. What a guy.

When we returned from the Canal we thanked him and told him that we just had to meet sometime. About six months (and a lot texting and Twitter) later he asked us if we wanted to join him and his husband Jason for lunch on a Holland America cruise ship while it was in port for a media day. We jumped at the chance as we would finally be able to meet him and talk in person. Since then we have met up with Seth and Jason a whole bunch of times, they have been to our place, we have been to theirs and we have become friends.

Which brings us to last Christmas Eve. We had told the guys that we had a surprise to tell them about when we met. You see the biggest thing that Seth and I have in common is that we both LOVE to plan travel. We will literally both grab computers after dinner and price airfare just for fun (seriously…much to Kathleen and Jason’s exasperation). When we met, that morning we told them we were going to be travel agents/consultants with Expedia.

They were thrilled for us and Seth asked me a kind of a strange question. He asked, “Will you be doing group travel?” I told him, “I guess we will. We haven’t really started yet.” That was the extent of it. We spent the rest of breakfast just talking about travel and stuff as we always do.

Then about 10 days later, Seth called me and asked if now that we had started our training, if we would be willing to help him plan and book a cruise for some friends to celebrate his 40th birthday in September 2018. He figured that we might end up with 20 or 25 people on a three-day Royal Caribbean cruise on Explorer of the Seas. First, I was beyond gratified that Seth would trust us with this. He has never been a huge fan of travel agents. His feeling was (and I can verify that it is the truth) that he knew more than they did about travel and cruising. Second, I was scared to death that we might screw it up. I had booked a bunch of cruises over the years but just for us. And I had never done a group. And we had done about three hours of training at that point. YIKES! But we said yes. How hard could it be? One of those situations where we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

The first thing I learned was…we couldn’t do it half way. We couldn’t book a group cruise with Kathleen starting in March or April or with me starting in 2021. We had to go all in right then. We really had no choice but to go all-in in when Seth invited more than 80 people thinking he would get 20-30 people and we wound up sailing in September with 62. If I do say so myself, the cruise was a HUGE success. There will be more about this cruise in future posts but for now, I just need to thank Seth and Jason for putting their faith in us. And for being our great friends.

Lastly, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” —Thomas Aquinas