My wife and I have been together for just over forty years now, and our last wedding anniversary was ruby – not the cheapest anniversary there is! Luckily for me, my wife has never been one for lavish gifts and jewellery. I knew that she probably wouldn’t even like to have a ruby necklace or ring, but I did want to do something nice for her. I really had to rack my brains to think of something that she might like.

I had only just retired about six months previously, so although we had all the time in the world, we had to be reasonably careful with our finances. I started to have a look around on the internet to see if I could find any suitably cheap holidays that might take her fancy. I didn’t want anything too strenuous, just somewhere that we could relax and take in a few sights, do a bit of shopping and catch some sun. After much disappointing searching, I eventually came across a cheap cruise deal which seemed great! It meant that we would get to see lots of different places, we could relax on the fantastic boat, and the sun bathing on the enormous sun deck would be bliss!

I went ahead and booked to cruise tickets, and it’s the best thing I have ever done. We had the most wonderful two weeks of our lives, and my wife was so shocked and thrilled when she found out we were celebrating our fortieth anniversary in such style! We both approached the trip with slight trepidation given our lack of experience out on the open sea, but we both found absolutely no problem being out on the ocean for such a long time. In fact, we had so much fun that we are heading off again next year to do it all over again!