There and Back Again by D.A.Webb

Given the ship's pharmacy only stocks emergency quantities of medications, passengers were instructed to obtain and pack ample supplies of all their prescriptions. That sounded reasonable, so I contacted my doctor, mail order supplier and insurance company in hopes of identifying any established procedures. The idea was to be proactive and avoid any unnecessary aggravations or delays. It seemed to work. The approved procedure was identified and put in play. Rather than bore you with all the details, let me just say after several weeks and many hours of frustrating calls some progress was made, but we were still short of goal. Obviously what we were attempting is exactly what the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) industry is designed to prevent. Not willing to give up, we recalculated our remaining shortages, installed the GoodRx application and identified local sources for our outstanding medications. Our family practitioner graciously provided paper scripts replacing the electroni...

Many have heard of visas and understand they are associated with passports allowing an individual to enter, leave or stay in a country for a specific period of time. As US citizens, we have enjoyed visa-free travel to most countries surrounding the states. In our travels, the only exception was Cuba where we simply filled out a small form while on the ship. Naively I expected something similar for the world cruise. I knew something was up when Royal Caribbean requested passengers manage their own visas. Some quick research revealed each country has different visa types with different requirements. Some were simple electronic visas requesting minimal information, while others were more complicated requesting pages of information. In one situation the requested information included grandparents ethnicity. Another required a trip to their embassy in Washington DC. All this was achievable, but their were three issues that could make visas and the trip a nightmare. The first issue...