Exactly two months before COVID-19 caused the SF Bay Area (and the world, in general) to issue a shelter in place on March 16, 2020, Allison and I had returned from our epic 72-day trip to Europe and South America.
We started in the south of Spain, cut over to Portugal, and back across to Barcelona. From there we hopped on a trans-Atlantic cruise through the Panama Canal and down to Chile. We continued to explore Chile, Peru (including Machu Picchu), and Ecuador (along with the Galapagos Islands).
Now that we’ve settled back into our “new normal” world of no traveling, we thought it would be fun to relive our experience. This will be a multi-part blog post chronicling our trek. It’s mostly from Allison’s perspective, since she documented the journey on her Facebook page. Hopefully this travelogue will inspire you to stay on your FIRE journey so that you can live the life you want! We know it’s so tough to be cooped up in one place, but we’re all trying to #FlattenTheCurve and minimize the impact to all the dedicated and amazing #FrontlineWorkers. #StaySafe
Part One covered Southern Spain and Portugal, and Part Two explored Madrid and Barcelona. This is Part Three: our first transatlantic cruise!...
11/22: Cruise ship in Barcelona: It’s 15° Celsius (59° F) out and the rain has agreed to wait until tonight. This is the least amount of clothes we have worn all week! #AdiosBarcelona
We finally got on the ship and left the Iberian peninsula for the island of Mallorca (close to Ibiza, which we will unfortunately not visit)! It’s so strange to be surrounded by people speaking English and not smoking like chimneys.
It’s weird not eating tapas for dinner at 9 PM. We were craving burgers after 2.5 weeks, so we had one for lunch. They were pretty disappointing, but hopefully it was just a side effect of cruise turnover and not any indication of the quality of food for the next month... However, the bed was sooo freaking comfortable, we fell asleep to the not-so gentle rocking of the ship.
11/23: Palma de Mallorca, Spain:
We landed in Mallorca at 7 AM, unfortunately we’re only here until 12:30 PM. We came into downtown, which doesn’t really open its doors until the cathedral opens at 10 AM. This cathedral is surprisingly large given how tiny this island is! The nave is the tallest in Spain, which is so hard to imagine, considering all the other cathedrals we’ve visited over the past 2.5 weeks! We hopped into a cab rather than the bus back to the ship, and we managed to close the car doors just in time. The heavens opened and dumped rain the entire drive back to the ship!
11/24: Caminito del Rey: Our ship was supposed to arrive in Malaga and dock at 10, so that we could have a solid 10 hours in Malaga, which is a decent size city. Unfortunately, due to some heavy rain/wind the previous night topped off by continued issues with one of the engines (which the Captain managed to gloss over), we were delayed by almost two hours.
Unfortunately, we had booked a group tour to hike the Caminito del Rey. They only sell 400 timed tickets a day, and our tickets were set for 1 PM, so we thought we were going to be screwed. We started to make alternate arrangements, but since it’s Sunday, a lot of places are closed/close early. As passengers rushed to get off the ship, one woman pushed past me, loudly saying, “I’ve been waiting two hours to get off the ship!” I yelled at her, “We’ve ALL been waiting two hours!” She had #SomeNerve (and not in a good way)!
Luckily, our tour guide company was able to pull some strings, and even though we arrived late, we were still able to walk the trail.
Our local guide sounded like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, from her British accent to her dry, snarky sense of humor. She gave us a bunch of cool facts about the history (King Alphonse XIII did not actually walk the entire path of the road), vegetation (carob trees are abundant here, and its seeds can be turned into gluten-free flour), and animal inhabitants (the griffyndor(??) vulture vomits acid when scared) of the area.
The trail is normally open rain or sun, but they were closed due to torrential rains the previous 3 days. #Lucky We ended up only walking 5 miles today, but a lot of it was walking up and down shallow stairs. This place is an engineering marvel that was primarily built by sailors, because they were used to working in high places, suspended by ropes.
They also built a railway across the gorge from the trail, to gain access to coal in Còrdoba, but by the time they finished it, coal taxes had crushed the market, so the railroad was never really used.
We reached the end of the trail, tired but happy to have been able to experience a wonderful and unique experience. Some fellow passengers had pooh-poohed our ability to do our excursion given how late we were, but sometimes a positive and hopeful attitude can work miracles!
11/25: Cádiz: So we sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar last night at midnight. I finished watching a super cheesy movie on TV, and I was still wide awake, so I figured I would look out the deck to see what I could see. Lo and behold, I was able to catch some cool shots. Some day, we’ll visit Gibraltar in person, for now, we’ll just wave at it in the night…
We woke up in Cádiz, about 80 miles northwest. We did a tour of the Old Town and then went on a last tapas crawl for lunch. The first stop was to Casa Manteca, which is a cool local tavern in the La Viña neighborhood.
It specializes in cold tapas and a Bullfighting motif (I was too busy focusing on the food to pay attention to the décor... #priorities). I was even inspired to order some local sherry, even though I don’t really drink anymore. So delicious!
Then we wandered to the Castillo de San Sebastián, which was unfortunately closed on Mondays (as is 90% of Spain), to walk off our appetizer tapas course so that we could head to the next place, El Faro. This place is part chi chi restaurant, part tapas bar (which is hidden in the back). The maitre d’ was a bit nonplussed to see two very casually dressed tourists come into his white tablecloth establishment, and he quickly guided us to the more casual tapas bar in the back.
We saw the bill from the people who had just vacated the bar and noticed “tapas de dia,” which looked surprisingly inexpensive. It was a delightful fish with lemon sauce on top of a light tomato sauce. All that for 2,40 €! They’re practically begging us to eat here! Our entire bill for both places, including booze, was 21 €, which is crazy cheap for two highly recommended places. I’m sure going to miss Spanish prices!
We walked back along the water, checking out the local park spaces. An old man saw us pointing in the distance at a nearby town, and he tried to explain to us in (rapid fire) Spanish that those were the towns of Roto and an old naval base. The more we tried to explain that we didn’t speak Spanish, the more he spoke to us... in Spanish... OK, then…
This is our last stop in Spain 😞. Tomorrow is a sea day, and then we stop in the Azores (Funchal) and then the Canary Islands. Adios y muchas gracias, Spain, it’s been great!
11/27: Funchal, Madeira: First sea day! I’m not a fan of the sea day, but it’s been the first free day we’ve had in a long time. We worked out and spent the afternoon in the spa, enjoying the hot tubs, sauna, and steam bath, but frankly, I couldn’t wait to get back on land!
Ask and you shall receive. We landed in Funchal, Madeira. It is so amazingly beautiful here!
Geologically, Madeira is "only" 5 million years old, so young by mainland standards. The weather diversity is similar to the Bay Area, lots of sunny and foggy weather, it can change between tunnels (the are 92 tunnels in Madeira, connecting the fours corner of the island).
Our guide told us that oneway commutes between the west and central parts of the island used to take 90 minutes (his roundtrip to school as a kid was over three hours!), but with the tunnels and new roadways, it can take as little as 20 minutes.
This is one of the few places that we could see actually living. The geography is beautiful, the climate is temperate (lows of 60 in the winter to 90 in the summer), and the people are super friendly. Two-bedroom condos start at 150,000 € (for a non-view place in central Funchal).
We have another sea day tomorrow, and we are supposed to dock in Ponta Delgado in the Azores on Friday. However, there is a potential storm coming from the North, so who knows what the captain will decide to do with us. Maybe an additional sea day - booo! If that is the case, it will be _nine_ straight days at sea! I might not last that long!
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and we have so much to be grateful for. For all of our family and friends, good health, and great luck. From our family to yours, have a Happy and Healthy Thanksgiving!
12/3: At Sea: We indeed did bypass Punta Delgada in the Azores due to an incoming cyclone from the north (Post-cruise note: remember the “foreshadowing” from Part 2…?). Of course, we missed the announcement from the captain on the loudspeakers, so it wasn’t until a fellow passenger informed us at dinner that moving the clock back an hour wouldn’t matter that we found out about our new itinerary. Time has no real meaning when you’re at sea. We have moved our clocks back about four times in six days, with another two to go until we hit Miami. This is the best way to beat jet lag!
So, since we missed the Azores, we are making an additional stop at NCL’s private island, Great Stirrup Cay, in the Bahamas. It’s a pointless stop for us, unless we want to gather 16 of our closest friends and fellow passengers and rent a two room private cabana for four hours, which they will bill our stateroom $649 “for our “convenience”...
At least we’ve made some very nice new friends on board. As proper San Franciscans, we’ve been adopted by the LGBTQI community. Our first friends on board were a lovely couple from Vegas, then a trio composed of a couple + their travel pal (gays + pal = gals?). We’ve also become friends with a Canadian couple, a trio of gal pals from New Orleans who have been friends since high school back in the 1960s, a couple from NM, etc. We even met an Oakland police officer on our first day (and I hadn’t seen him again until this afternoon, ten days later). Always good to make law enforcement connections!
Here’s a photo of our new family celebrating Thanksgiving and random sunset/rise photos from our deck. We’ve taken to calling ourselves the G7. Sunday was super turbulent, with the ship rocking from back to stern quite viciously (usually, the ship rocks from side to side, but this ship is extra ambitious). Even my iron stomach was feeling it (or maybe I just needed my afternoon coffee...)
At least the ship finally started showing us some NFL action. On Saturday, Dylin desperately searched the ship for "The Game" (aka, Ohio State vs. Michigan). By lucky happenstance, we saw a guy streaming the game on his tablet, so he quickly became our new best friend. I found a TV in one of the ship’s bars that he could cast the game to, and he quickly became everybody’s best friend. The cherry on top was the final score. O-H, as they say...
Our sea days have been spent working on the book (Dylin) or lounging around in the spa, reading a real book (me). We have only managed to walk about 3 miles a day (mostly to the buffet and other restaurants arriving at the ship) since we’ve been on the ship..., which is way below our Spanish steps 😞. I am hoping to keep the weight gain to less than 5 pounds for this trip...
Hopefully we can snag some free WiFi in the Bahamas on Thursday... if not, then we will be in Miami the day after and will start the second half of our cruising adventures, which will be much more action packed than this one has been!
12/5: Bahamas: We stopped in the Bahamas for some much needed beach time (although, we are stopping in Grand Cayman to start our next cruise). I tried to lay down on a lounger, but I started getting land sick, so we had to keep moving to keep from getting dizzy.
These cabanas are nice, but at $300, they were insanely overpriced. And since the crew wasn’t policing them after the morning, we got the chance to check them out for free!
12/6: Miami, FL: Greetings from Miami! We successfully crossed the Atlantic like other great explorers/sailors like de Vasco, Columbus, and Johnny Depp…
We’re in Miami for five hours before our ship sets sail again and we start the next leg of our journey - Grand Caymans; Limón, Costa Rica; Peru; and Chile...
Our Epic 72-Day Trip to Europe & South America: Part 2 (Madrid & Barcelona) - Retire By 45
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