The trip gets re-defined

We’ve gone two days now without snagging any new flotsam. 

The seas have been calm with the weather varying from eerie fog and mono-chromatic horizon-less seas, to beautiful sunny skies with puffy clouds and just a hint of storminess in the distance.  It seems like we can begin to think that there just might be a future to this trip after all, albeit an altered one.

The original itinerary had us stopping in Rio, then Fernando de Naronha, Cape Verde, Madeira, England and finally Bremerhaven, Germany.  Knowing that we were 4 days behind and that Rio was needed for refueling, we all knew that something had to give.  After days of handwringing and apparently some argument, Lindblad has presented us with two alternatives.

After Rio, the ship will still make all the planned stops up until Madeira.  We will arrive in Madeira on April 16th, only 2 days before we were supposed to be in Germany.  From there the ship will proceed directly to Bremerhaven and arrive on the 21st.  Those who wish can stay on board, which means arriving 3 days late.

As an alternative, the ship has offered to drop passengers in Madeira.  They will put us up in a hotel in Madeira, and the following afternoon they have privately chartered a flight directly from Madeira to Germany.  They’ll then book us into a hotel in Hamburg, so we can catch our previously scheduled travel connections the next day.

So, we still get to go to the more exotic locations as planned, we get nearly an additional 24 hours in Madeira and we still make our connection to Prague on time.  All we lose is the stop in Dartmouth, England, which would have been very nice.  I was looking forward to crossing the English Channel and parts of the North Sea again.  But we’ll gladly trade that for not missing these little islands in the middle of nowhere.