Tom - What excellent news indeed that you & Mona will be joining the festivities on MUSH. It will be good to see you both again - we can have a mini-reunion for our Voyager Baltics cruise a couple of years ago. However, you must be prepared for the frantic phenomenon that is an LCT cruise. It will be an interesting (thrilling, shocking, delightful, appalling, appealing, criminal) contrast to the fairly calm and dignified atmosphere of the Baltics cruise.

As I noted in one of my posts from WAVE recently, we received some good inside dope from the Asst. F&B Mgr., Franck Galzy, who just left the Mariner. MUSH is already being discussed among the management staff. Franck knew that our little band of banditos and raucous revelers was scheduled to take over Deck 7. It seems that they are doing a few things in anticipation of our week aboard Mariner, as follows: They will be doing a series of sensitivity training for all members of the staff to show them how to gently guide MUSHers who have overindulged back to their cabins with the least disruption to the rest of the passengers. The provisioning people will be ordering several extra pallets of Cosmo ingredients (they will use the Conference Room for the extra storage required - sorry, Friends of Bill W. - no meetings on that cruise). Finally, the bartenders will be receiving from the Gurkha security staff some special training in self-defense to prepare them for Suzette.

So you see, Tom, that this will not be your father's Alaska cruise.

Cheers, Fred

PS - Sorry to repeat a paragraph from a previous post; but it is more relevant to MUSH than it was to WAVE.