Home!
Over the course of our journey, we have seen little
rain—some at night or a day at sea. Not once were we hampered by rain as we
explored all these interesting places—until the last 3 days! We didn’t go
onshore in Corfu Greece or Dubrovnik Croatia. Fortunately, we had been to both
places before and chose to keep warm and dry onboard! Our final day was a water
sport day in Triluke Bay Croatia, but the water temperature was 62 degrees and
we declined!
Our grand voyage ended Thursday, May 1st in
Venice. We got up before sunrise to spend 6:00-7:00 AM on deck, enjoying the
sail into Venice harbor, up to St. Mark’s Square in the Grand Canal and then through
another canal to the ship’s dock.
Picture 1 shows the sun coming up on our way into the
Harbor. Picture 2 show’s a view of Venice. The Campanile (Bell Tower) of St.
Mark’s Cathedral and the Doge’s Palace are on the right. Picture 3 is a
close-up of St. Mark’s Square. What’s interesting about this last picture is
the lack of people. We’ve been to Venice 4 times and the Square has always been
a mob of people. What a lovely city.
Since we have spent time there in the past we went directly
to the airport for our flight home. We experienced one of the “joys” of travel:
flight 3 hours late, missed connection and arriving home 24 hours after we got
up in the pre-dawn hours in Venice. Why was the flight 3 hours late? It had
been struck by lightening on the way into Venice a few hours earlier! They, of
course, had to go over it with a fine-tooth comb to ensure no problems and then
re-route us to spend more time over land because we lost a secondary radio.
We’ve had late flights a lot, but that’s a first!
We left Cary on January 3 and have circumnavigated the
world—2 flights at the ends and 116 days on the Seabourn Sojourn in the middle.
Of those 116 days we spent 59 days in port, 56 days at sea and lost a day as we
crossed the dateline. We visited 49 ports on 4 continents. The total distance
sailed was 26, 118 nautical miles, or 30,035.7 land miles.
How blessed we were to be able to have this experience.
Thanks for traveling with us.
