The World's Largest Cruise Night is THIS TUESDAY!

Coming up this week, Tuesday, October 12, is The World’s Largest Cruise Night! This will be an exciting night for you to bring your family and learn all about cruising.

Our event will be held in Colorado Springs at The Solaris Center (3815 N. Academy Blvd., near the intersection of Austin Bluffs and Academy, next to Harmony Bowl). Read more about The Solaris Center below.

I realize that some of you are not in the Colorado Springs area, so for you, I have launched a website for The World’s Largest Cruise Night especially for you. I will update it frequently with extraordinary offers as I get them from the cruise lines. This site will be available until the end of October. That web address is
http://wlcn.cruising.org/legacyfamilytravel

There are several special offers that will only be available for a few days surrounding my World’s Largest Cruise Night, and these WILL be available to you even if you can’t come to my Real Life World’s Largest Cruise Night event. Please check this website daily so that you don’t miss out on the family cruise vacation you have been waiting for.

 Now back to our World’s Largest Cruise Night here in Colorado Springs. During our evening together, you will be able to familiarize yourself with both Deep Water (Ocean) Cruising and River Cruising. AND by booking your next cruise with Legacy Family Travel on this night, you will save money.
• You will be able to peruse displays from my favorite family friendly cruise lines (Royal Caribbean, Holland America, and Disney), as well as a few other cruise lines that you may find appealing.
• River Cruising has become the hottest way to see Europe, Asia and South America – I will introduce you to two River Cruise Lines that are offering astounding sale prices and perks for the World’s Largest Cruise Night.

• You will be able to take advantage of limited time offers to help you realize your dream family cruise vacation. These offers will include onboard credit, reduced deposit, hundreds (in some cases thousands) of dollars off your booking, and last but absolutely not least – special group rates on select sailings.

• There will be informative cruising videos running (provided by my favorite cruise lines) on two huge television screens, refreshments for everyone, and door prizes (you must be present at the time of drawing to win). Now, these aren’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill door prizes, rather they are restaurant gift cards, gift baskets, beautiful Disney posters for the kids – you’ll have to see it to believe it.

• And, of course, I will be available to answer any questions you have about cruising!



Legacy Family Travel is very proud to support Military Community Youth Ministries (MCYM) and amusekids! Family Worship Ministry. During our World’s Largest Cruise Night, you will have an opportunity to meet representatives of these two wonderful organizations and find out how they are positively impacting the lives of the next generation. When you allow Legacy Family Travel to help you make your family vacation dreams come true, you are contributing something valuable in at least three major ways:
- by helping the teenage children of our military cope during difficult times – not just here in Colorado Springs but all around the world. Teens of families in which one or both parents are deployed are often overlooked. They desperately need encouragement, too, and MCYM does just that.

- by giving children of all ages an opportunity to worship in their style - a service with high octane, fun music, encouraging talks with skits and hands on demonstrations, a coloring wall for the littlest ones, and people who have a heart for family worship. Amusekids! Family Worship provides all this and more!

- You will also be supporting The Solaris Center itself, which is a much needed outreach to the children and youth of Colorado Springs.

Even if you have no plans to book a cruise now or ever, may I ask you to come to our World’s Largest Cruise Night and meet the men and women who are diligently pouring into our community? You will get your socks blessed off!



Remember, Tuesday night, October 12, 6:30 – 8:30 at the Solaris Center. If you bring friends and they book a cruise with me during the month of October, I will reward you!


Thank you in advance for allowing me to be your travel agent. I appreciate your trust and your business.

Cave Dive, Part 2

Part 2 of my friend Les Knotts' cave diving story.  Just so you can picture the person this voice is coming from, here are some photos of the dive. 

This is Les and his beautiful, sweet wife, Monika.  Together the Knotts family
ministers to teens worldwide who have been affected by their parents'
military deployments.  They are affiliated with
Military Community Youth Ministries. 
If you would like to be a part of this vital ministry, please visit


www.mcym.org

Without further ado - here's the man himself:

Shortly we surfaced. It was an expansive cave. An air-filled one, for one by one, following the lead of our guide, we removed our regulators and breathed what seemed to me to be remarkably fresh air, considering the circumstances. We had eight feet of headroom here, but that narrowed toward the edges of the irregularly-shaped room. Protruding from the surface of the cave were the thick, intertwined striations of roots from the trees above, seeking the life-giving, life-threatening waters below ground. In the near distance was a bright electrical floodlight that gave some light to what would otherwise be lit in deep silence only by our lanterns. I could see the cable running to it from the surface, and wondered how often such a thing would have to be replaced, given the constant wetness of the conditions. I rolled onto my back and finned gently over to check the condition of the lamp, which turned out not to be a light at all, but a brightly lit hole to surface. That was our wonderful above-ground sun punching a serpentine aperture through to this depth, right through the rock. It was about 20- inches wide, and had a smattering of greenery lacing the porous sides. Mesmerizing. The cable I had seen was not cable at all, but a thick root that had come down from above, found only air, and was snaking its way back into the cave roof rock near the opening. Again I lingered, looking.



Others explored the length and breadth of the cave. It was quiet—reverently so. Sergio, our guide, admitted that he came here to float in the quiet darkness for long periods of isolated meditation. I could see that. I was ready for a nap, myself.


No nap was immediately forthcoming. After checking our air reserves, we submerged to continue the journey. Predictably, Heavy Breather was at 500 pounds, which is normally when we’d head for the surface. That’s in the red zone of the dial, and we had agreed to use a third of our air on the way in, a third on the way out, and keep a third in reserve. It wasn’t strictly that we had violated that rule, as we had opportunity to return to the surface after the big screen panorama to retrieve new tanks for the cavern portion of the dive. We chose not to, and now we were only five minutes from the opening, so there was not any real risk, as the other divers all had 1000 pounds of pressure each. Plus Sergio had a spare tank on his back with a spare regulator. I indicated my low air, and Sergio paired with me for the swim out.


In three minutes of swimming, it was clear that Sergio could not, indeed, swim this cave network with his eyes closed as he had earlier claimed. He searched calmly, then more vigorously for the familiar underwater markers he had used for ten years of diving in this, his favorite cave site. He did not see them. We were swimming the wrong way. Our guide jerked his head left and right, up and down. He was actively looking, but not finding, that which he sought. Sergio grabbed my harness to keep me close, then we reversed direction.


We emerged once again in the now-familiar cave, no closer to the exit than we were three minutes earlier. He got his bearings, and then he took us beneath the surface in the opposite direction from where we had just come. Sure enough, five minutes later, we were on the surface, glorious sunlight poking through the trees into our faces. Sergio admitted the obvious as we stripped out of our wetsuits: that he had been lost. We knew. He remarked about how calm we had all been, and we just shrugged. Panic never helped in difficult circumstances before, why start now? Later, Arnie asked me how much air I had in my tank when we emerged from the dangerous beauty of the cave. I had not even looked. Obviously, I had enough to get out.





*this tidbit was withheld from the group until we had emerged from the dive.