Gregory's travel blog: 2021

…actually, the elephant that’s *not* in the room - our luggage. I opted to try out a luggage forwarding service, to finally live the dream of traveling for an extended period of time, never needing to go to baggage claim. Just traveling with carry-on stuff, pretty great, right?

Well. Our suitcases sat in Honolulu for 5 days, then sat at LAX for 5 days. It obviously was then going to be a horse race to get it to the ship before it sailed. Which didn’t happen. It’s a long story, involving a not-particularly-pleased Gregory dealing with this outfit. They tried to forward the suitcases to a following port of call, but that never happened either. Seeing that there was a distinct possibility of disaster, we got a cheap suitcase and threw together some ill-fitting and essentially inappropriate clothes, including some we bought in a panicky shopping session at a department store in Miami, before we flew to Barbados.

I wont go into the gory details, but *finally* today, look what arrived in our room, 11 days late, while we were out and about, splashing around.

…what seemed like it might have been a bad omen - skedaddling out of Dominica before we could even disembark- turned out to be ok. There are quite a few ships out and about who have been sailing just fine for several months, but just in the last couple of weeks, have developed Covid problems. I worried that the unexplained decision to pass by Dominica and head back to Barbados might have been along those lines. But as I said, fortunately we’re all ok and the cruise proceeds. We had a nice catamaran cruise up and down the Barbados coast today, splashed around with a couple of hawksbill turtles and a large school of Sergeant Majors.

The Queen Mary 2 (below) is anchored just outside the harbor, we’re reading about her Covid woes and staffing problems. Evidently she will hang around here for several more days and then head directly back to Southampton, missing a couple of Caribbean calls and her call to New York.