Day 1 March 3, 2015 - Back on the Road Again – Finally
After a year’s hiatus from travel, we are ready to start pursuing new adventures again. Last year we used our travel budget for some long overdue home improvements doing such mundane, boring things as putting a new roof on the house, new hurricane proof garage doors, and some upgrades that we have long talked about. Also Holly got a new puppy and wasn’t ready yet to leave her new baby in someone else’s hands. Now that’s behind us we are ready to get back out into the world and continue to check off places in Holly’s book “1000 Places to See Before You Die”. Tonight we are at the Miami Airport Sheraton awaiting tomorrow mornings flight to Barbados in the Lesser Antilles. There we will spend one night at the ocean front Hilton prior to boarding the “Sea Cloud” on Thursday. I made reservations over the internet for Wednesday night at a restaurant called “Lobster Alive” on the beach in Barbados. They specialize in live from the tank Caribbean Spiny Lobsters caught by scuba divers in the nearby Grenadine Islands and flown daily to Barbados "alive".
The “Sea Cloud” was built in 1931 by E. F. Hutton for his heiress wife Marjorie Merriweather Post and is the most authentic, historic, and elegant hand-sailed tall ship in the world. The “Sea Cloud” was originally fitted with 10 lavishly appointed staterooms decorated in a range of styles with marble charcoal burning fireplaces and gold fixtures in the bathrooms. The ship sails with a crew of 60 and frequently hosted European monarchs, princes, presidents, cabinet members and celebrities like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as guest of the Hutton’s. A few additional cabins have been added to make it a little more cost effective for tourist to sail aboard her, however she still retains the luxury, and we were fortunate enough to get one of the original cabins outfitted just as it was during days of yore. It will be fun fantasizing about who might have stayed in our cabin, I hope we are not haunted by the ghost of some liberal “New Deal” Democrat. Marjorie supported Roosevelt’s “new deal” and was personal friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, while E. F was an industrialist and Republican and against everything Roosevelt was trying to do. This plus E. F.’s infidelities led to a very contentious divorce; however Marjorie retained ownership of the “Sea Cloud” as well as Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Topridge in the Adirondacks, and Hillwood on Long Island. Marjorie was the wealthiest woman in the United States, with a fortune worth about $250 million, married four times, and died in 1973 at the age of 86. Legend has it that the “Sea Cloud” was so beautiful that when sailors first saw it, they began to weep.
As with our past trips we will be keeping a daily travelogue of our activities to help us organize our pictures and thoughts when we return home. Those of you who have seen the DVDs and books we put together after each trip understand the importance of the daily log. Our e-mails represent our thoughts and observations at the time and in some cases any resemblance between our blog and fact may be purely coincidental. As always, if our e-mails start to get too boring please use the delete button or e-mail us and we will take you off the list. Please feel free to e-mail us with questions or comments at any time. During this trip we plan to send almost daily e-mail travelogues of our adventures while on the ship because the ship now has internet access.
“Some experiences simply do not translate. You have to go to know”. Kobi Yamada
“Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.” – Havelock Ellis
More to follow tomorrow from Barbados,
Tom & Holly