We’ve been home for a week now. We had our kitchen floor redone. We also had our first community Potluck Dinner and Ron cooked Pork Saltimbucco (learned from one of the guest chefs on the ship). I made a bacon cheeseburger tator tot casserole. We’ve have not been to Disneyland since Thanksgiving, so we took…

Here we are at the last two days of our adventure. There is still a lot going on aboard ship. Each ship in the fleet on each cruise has an “On Deck for a Cause” fundraiser where participants make a donation, get a shirt, and walk 5K (12 times around the deck) for cancer research….

St Thomas is our last port of call for this cruise. It is another island with lush green vegetation and beautiful beaches. This island was also severely damaged by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. However, in contrast to Dominica recovery is well underway with 90% of the electricity restored. Signs of the damage are still…

Dominica is another island with lush green vegetation and beautiful beaches. This island, like others we will visit, was severely damaged by Hurricane Maria in September 2017. Even though the hurricane hit six months earlier, our guide told us that rebuilding is only just now getting underway. There has been financial aid from various countries,…

Barbados looks like all the other Caribbean islands in this region but at its heart it’s very different. Unlike the other Caribbean islands that were formed by volcanic activity, Barbados is composed of coral roughly 90 m (300 ft) thick! Barbados sits at the junction between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates. The subduction of the…

This Grand Voyage is coming to its end. The talk now is sprinkled with ideas for packing, exchanging contact information, and what the weather is like back home. This seems like a good time to show our mascots for this voyage, the penguins. When we first boarded the ship back in January, there were eight…

Our stop today was at Île Royale. The islands of Île Royale, Île du Diable (“Devils Island”), and Île Saint-Joseph comprise what was once a notoriously brutal penal colony in French Guiana and was the subject of the movie “Papillon” starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Île Royale was the main prison and administrative center…

We spent one day traveling eastward through the Amazon River back out to the Atlantic Ocean. As I do my daily walk on deck, I see people getting a little nostalgic about the huge bugs that have been floating along with us on this portion of the trip. When we reached the Atlantic, I expected…

This is our last port of call in Brazil. It is a tender port which means that the cruise ship is too large or the port is too small to allow us to pull up to the port directly. We use one or more of the ship’s lifeboats to travel to and from the port….

Today’s stop in Parintins was for one purpose only: to attend the Boi Bumbá Show. This show is done only for Cruise ships and is a smaller version of a huge festival put on in June of each year. The celebration in June is held over three days and is the main celebration in this…