Barbara sold her house in Tennessee today. Well, at least she received a signed contract from the steadfast real estate broker in Lawrenceburg. An e-mail just came with the signed contract attachment and with the subject line reading, "Yippeeeeeeee." The closing should happen between Ghana and Senegal. Actually, the closing should be in Lawrenceburg, TN or maybe Huntsville, AL, but we will be between Takoradi, Ghana and Dekar, Senegal when it happens. Hopefully, on the Silver Wind. This is the same ship we left in Monte Carlo early last July, and like Trigger responding to a whistle it will pick us up again late next week in Cape Town. Of course the problem will be that we need to fly two long overnight flights averaging 5,000 miles each to get to Cape Town first. When we do, we will occupy Suite 437 again where a secret message hidden in a cabinet may or may not be there to greet us. Wonder how it got there.
Besides the number of years worrying (and maintaining) an unoccupied house and considerable land in South Central Tennessee and the kind of out of the blue sale thereof has stressed us a bit, so has my back spasms. I seemed to have injured myself, probably by thinking of all the stuff one needs to do when trying not to be stressed by a surprise house sale and counting vitamins, bow ties, and other essentials for a 11,000 miles sea voyage. Attached are a couple of pictures from last Spring's voyage on Silver Wind, just in case you were curious about how we spend our time on board. I look at those pictures to remind myself why I doing this again. The pictures were taken in Silver Wind bar, called "The Bar" as the others bars are called, "The Panorama" and "Pool Bar", respectively, and on deck during one late afternoon as we sailed through the Messina Straits, the narrow gap between Sicily and the boot of mainland Italy.
First some statistics for the imminent cruise:
Flight Miles: 16,584
Cruise Miles: 10,998
Days in Cape Town, South Africa: 3
Days on-board ship: 39
Ports visited: 22 (counting Cape Town twice)
Latitudes spanned by sea: 33 degrees South to 41 North
Countries visited: South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Ghana, Senegal, Cape Verde Islands, Canary Islands (Spain), Morocco, Mallorca and Ibiza (Spain), and mainland Spain.
My total country count after this trip: 137 (but who's counting)
Special Celebration: Barbara and my first wedding anniversary in Walvis Bay or Swakupmund, Namibia
A few folks have asked me about the Costa Condordia disaster. No, I've never been on Costa. It is a big ship mass market line that caters to mostly Italians and apparently is run essentially independently from its parent company, Carnival Holdings. That outfit owns about half of all the world's cruise ships including Carnival, Princess, Holland-America, and a bunch more. We go exclusively on Silversea Cruises' ships. The biggest Silversea ship I've been on has a maximum of less than 400 passengers. The upcoming cruise is on Silver Wind with a maximum guest capacity of 296 and 222 crew members. The average passenger load is about 250 or so on the itineraries we usually go on. So there are approximately one crew member per guest! Also, you may recall that everyone gets a butler to ensure that our shoes are always polished (for some reason). All the Silver Wind's passengers and crew fit in the ship's four lifeboats. It's a different animal from the 4,000 person plus cruise ships, kind of like comparing a bed and breakfast in a lovely upscale neighborhood in Paris to huge Holiday Inn in an industrial suburb in, say, Detroit. The safety of the big ships is still very high, but the number of real maritime officers is the same for a 5000 passenger ship as in our little ship. That means that if there's a problem, there are loads of real trained experts to deal with it. On a big ship you are directed by the assistant laundry supervisor if you are lucky. On Silver Wind, it is probably a maritime academy officer or helmsman. The facts of the Costa grounding are still unclear, but my experiences on the bridge on Silversea ships have proven to me that the level of seriousness and competence on the small six ship line can not be beat. Again, all of Silversea's ships in total accommodate a maximum about 2,000 guests. And Silversea always does its "muster drill" for all new guests coming on board before the ship sails from the first port, by the way.
Hope you will enjoy following us along on this remarkable trip. We're particularly looking forward to visits to game parks accessible from the Indian Ocean side of South Africa as well as a number of nature reserves along the way going up the African Coast and on the Cape Verde and Canary Islands, visiting a souk or two in Morocco, sampling some sherry in Jarez, Barbara seeing the El Hambra for the first time while I check out the "white town" of Mijas, taking the funky train from Palma to Soller on Majorca, and of course seeing the great Gaudi Art Noveau architecture in Barcelona. And I'll try not to make too much fun of the other guests, not too much.
Please keep in touch and let me know what you think of my journal, and please feel free to ask any questions about the trip. The satellite rates to access the Internet are high on the ship, but it costs about the same to send a long response as a short one or to receive a whole bunch of e-mails as a few since we don't pay to read to compose responses. And we'd love to hear from the Western Northern Hemisphere to make sure it's still there.....
See you next from Africa, back pain and Lufthansa willing.
Mike
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