Travels of Bill and Valerie Watts

     Hi all from beautiful Funchal (fun-shall), Madeira, Portugal! Apologies for not posting sooner. We've been busy enjoying our time on the ship!      Over the last week we've hit a rhythm, waking up, getting ready for the day, going to enrichment, eating lunch, playing Bananagrams, hanging out for a bit, getting ready for dinner, and eating dinner.      Enrichments continue to be a highlight of the trip. Learning about English sponsoring piracy due to the Papal decree splitting the east and west between Spain and Portugal and individual pirates like Sir Francis Drake and Captain Morgan was great. We've also covered the importance of sugar from ancient times to current times, the impacts of Rome on the Iberian peninsula, and the rise of the Umayyads and Muslim influence on the peninsula after the fall of Rome and the subsequent Christian Reconquest. We missed yesterday's discussion on Pirates and Persecution, talking about Jewish pirates an...

       Hi all! Welcome to another beautiful day at sea! The waves are picking up as we continue northeast across the Atlantic but in a gentle rocking motion. Weather is still beautiful although we have seen some rain at night. Onto yesterday's adventures!     Yesterday we lost our first hour of the five we will be losing on our way to Portugal. Jet lag has started taking effect, making it harder to get to bed and harder to not sleep the day away, but it's not going to stop us from enjoying every moment of the trip! We ended up sleeping until around 10:00am again, but got up, checked in on things, got cleaned up for the day, and headed up to the Lido deck for lunch. Lunch for me was fajitas on fresh tortillas with all the fixings. They were quite delicious and I was able to put extra veggies on them. I feel like restaurants often short change you on the onion and peppers, but those are my favorite part of fajitas, so it was nice to be able to put as many oni...

 Hi all! Hoping this one is shorter than yesterday's, but no promises. 😀     After a fantastic first day on our new home, we settled in for a night's rest. We both woke up around 10am feeling surprisingly great! Considering we don't usually drink alcohol when we are home, the champaign and palomas didn't seem to have much of an impact on our ability to rest. One of the interesting things they have on the ship is an IV bar, where you can get IV fluids if you need to "rehydrate, recharge and feel revitalized". Thankfully, that hasn't been needed it to date.     With a slow start, we got cleaned up and headed up to the Lido deck for lunch. Today they had Thai food in the Asian corner which was good. I also grabbed a pulled pork sandwich and some tuscan style creamy chicken. By the time we got a table it had all mixed together and was an interesting flavor. Not something I will recommend and soupy things will be getting their own plates from now on. Maybe Val...

     Hi all! It's been while since we posted. We have done a couple of smaller trips over the last year, but we are back with another big bucket list trip - a transatlantic crossing! Ever since I was a young and learning about the dangers people faced on long ocean travels, not knowing what weather they would see, having bad or incomplete maps, piracy, and objects in the water that may be hidden from sight, I thought it seemed like a grand adventure! When I saw a deal for a three week cruise that crosses the Atlantic Ocean, I knew we needed to jump at the chance for experience. That deal showed up just 6 short months ago and like most of our travels, this trip snuck up on us in quick fashion, and I am so glad it's here.     The last year has been very challenging professionally. From being acquired by a PE firm, knowing cuts were coming and having to make tough decisions about my team, losing one member to layoffs, another to a customer, almost losing a second t...

It’s been almost a week since Hobbiton and a lot has happened, so I’ll try to catch everyone up without being too verbose. (Future Bill: I was very verbose.) The day after we were in Tauranga, the cruise headed to the Bay of Islands. This was a day where we were anchored in the bay and you had to tender in. There were no excursions available from the ship, and we couldn’t really find any excursions that we wanted to do through 3rd parties, so we thought maybe we’ll just get off the shop and walk around town where the tenders drop you off. We didn’t end up getting off the ship. The waters were rough, the tenders were tiny, and Valerie turned green just looking at them. We decided to have a chill day on the ship and enjoy the last bit of quiet before we left New Zealand and headed back to Sydney. We did play some Bananagrams, I forgot to write down the daily scores, but the final score for the cruise was Bill 7, Valerie 5. While playing Bananagrams, something interesting happened. I beca...