Welcome to our Travel Blog!

Overview: this year we are really fortunate to be able to once again do a full world voyage on a beautiful Cunard ship – it’s roundtrip Southampton for 110 nights. In addition we are doing a 7-night cruise to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Bruges before the world voyage and for this portion we are joined by our daughter and son-in-law from Scotland.   Personal note: a few days before leaving the US I came down with a bad case of flu with a severe chest infection. Visits to the doctor

Once again, we arrived in a freezing London following our flight from San Francisco. Based on our experience last year of struggling with our circus troupe size collection of luggage through Heathrow Airport to the Heathrow Express train, this year we arranged for a very large car and average sized driver to pick us up at the terminal and take us to the Paddington Hilton in London. It took a little bit longer, and cost a lot more, but I feel it was well worth it to avoid the

Following a sea day on the 5 th , with a gala evening requiring the first rollout of the penguin suit, the ship docked in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday January 6 th . With the forecast for high temperatures to be below freezing and my current illness there was no way I was going to be able to get off the ship today – all I wanted to do was sleep between intense coughing fits. I managed to get an appointment to see the ship’s doctor in the afternoon, she prescribed antibiotics.

Today we returned to Southampton and said goodbye to Billy and Tracy who are returning to Scotland. Yesterday evening we spent a little time packing up our cabin and today the stewards will move our things down the hall from 7049 to 7099. As we had left two suit bags unopened, and most of our things were on hangers in the wardrobes the move should be pretty easy. Our new cabin is a Club Balcony and allows us to take all of our meals in the Club Restaurant at the same table wi

We had a pleasant 3 day sail from Southampton down to the Island of Madeira which is governed by Portugal and today the ship is docked in the port of Funchal. I saw the ship’s doctor again on Tuesday as my improvement is not forthcoming; she prescribed additional medication and today I’m feeling a bit better, though still coughing a lot.   We’ve been to Funchal a few times before and so today we opted not to do a ship’s excursion and instead took the shuttle bus from the dock

A short overnight sail has brought the Queen Anne to the port of Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife which is governed by Spain. On previous visits the Santa Cruz we did not find much of interest in the town and so today we are taking a ship’s excursion to the north coast of the island.   After leaving the port our bus headed up into the hills; driving narrow, winding, one lane, precipice-edged roads would be a feature of this trip. Our first stop was at Playa de Las Teresit