First Full Day on Board

Our first full day aboard ship has been a spectacular day as far as the weather goes – temperature in the mid-20’s and sunny all day. For a day at sea, the scenery has been amazing. A geography lesson………there are approximately 1400 Greek islands (only 169 of them are inhabited) and we have been sailing past many of them today – they are all volcanic by appearance with lots of mountains visible on all of the ones that we have been sailing past.

We finally got some sleep last night – about 10 hours of it and then had bacon and eggs on our veranda this morning – what an absolutely decadent way to live! The ship has been great with us – providing us with some clothes and excuses. They have given both of us some T-shirts and they kindly offered me some formal clothing for this evening. Unfortunately, when the clothing arrived, I didn’t care for it, so we will not be going formal tonight – we will have 3 more opportunities to be formal during the cruise. Apparently, we have been excused from the dining room dress code until our luggage arrives, so we aren’t feeling guilty – just sad because we really do enjoy formal nights.

Once again, I am writing this post sitting on our verandah while waiting to go to dinner. Tomorrow should be a good day – Corfu and hopefully when we return to our cabin, our luggage will have arrived. If it has, then tomorrow’s post will include pictures.

September 28, 2013

This post is being written from the verandah in our cabin on board the Ryndham. We made it with about an hour to spare. Unfortunately, one suitcase is at JFK and the other one is in Amsterdam. Since tomorrow is a sea day, we are stuck with what we are wearing until the marines (in the form of our suitcases) arrive on Monday. To top it all off – tomorrow night is the first formal night and while Graham rented a tux which arrived safely, I have nothing to wear.

Unfortunately, this means that you will have to wait until we return to the ship on Monday for any pictures – the download cord is in the luggage.

For today this will be a very short post – both Graham and I ended up in seats that would not recline on our 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, so neither one of us has had any sleep in over 27 hours and we are beat!!

September 27,2013

As I write this, the first post about our “trip of a lifetime”, I am sitting at a gate in Amsterdam. We are not supposed to be anywhere near Amsterdam!!!!!!

We left home just before 8:00 this morning and headed for Detroit. Everything went really well until we were aboard our aircraft and the door was closed. Someone fortunately noticed that somewhere on our plane’s trip in to Detroit, it managed to hit a bird…….so much for that plane. By the time they decided what to do, we were going to miss our connecting flight in JFK. The best that they could do for us at the gate would have had us landing in Athens at 5:40 Saturday afternoon – one hour after our ship sailed.

Panic–stricken (at least I was) we went looking for a Delta agent and ran into an amazing lady named Janine. This lady managed to get us from Detroit to Amsterdam and in about an hour and a half, we will be flying from Amsterdam to Athens arriving at 12:45 – enough time to make the 1 ½ hour trip from the airport to the cruise ship terminal and make it to the ship on time. Our only question is – will our luggage make it to Athens with us?????

Nascar

WOW!!!!!!

The weekend of June 14 - 17, my sister, Linda, her husband, Ted, Graham & I spent the weekend in Michigan......most of it at the Michigan International Speedway. What an adventure!!!!

We did this through a company called MyRaceTravel - pretty sure that we won't ever use a company again. Drove down Friday and got settled into our hotel.....The Sheraton at the Detroit Airport. While a beautiful hotel with large, comfortable rooms, however, this hotel was more than an hour from the racetrack.

On Saturday we had to leave the hotel at 8:00 am to accommodate those people who had pit passes - 2 buses, but apparently they both had to leave at the same time. We arrived at the racetrack at about 9:30 (for a 2:00 Nationwide race). After soaking in the atmosphere of the place for a while we headed for our seats - I think that we climbed Mt Everest. Once we reached our seats, I was quite determined that I wasn't going back down until the race was over.We were able to see the final practice for the Sprint Cup race on Saturday.

The Nationwide race was exciting, however, the Sprint Cup race was absolutely amazing. Since Michigan is the fastest track on the Nascar circuit, we were watching cars go over 200 mph on the straightaways. A 2 mile track and it seemed that they were always right in front of us.

After spending the afternoon in the sun on Saturday, we returned on Sunday for more of the same (only this time we had to leave the hotel at 7:00). Despite our best attempts to avoid it, we ended up getting badly burned on our arms.

Despite the challenges we had an amazing time. Unfortunately, Denny came in 32nd or 33rd and Linda's driver, Jeff Gordon didn't even make it through turn 2 on the first lap.