On Sunday we arrive in Port Everglades for Fort Lauderdale. In the region of 1000 passengers who joined the ship for the first segment will leave and a similar number will board in their place. Presumably the newcomers will, in the main, be American.
Jane and I will be meeting up with Chris and Jenny Branston who are Uni friends from the sixties. I was their best man when they married soon after we graduated. They have lived in the US since they both retired, although they have owned homes in Florida for much longer than that. They will drive through the Everglades from their home outside Naples, on the Gulf coast.
Earlier this week I received an email from Roger Bialcik in Chicago, who I met when I was working with Julian Avery in Milwaukee in the summer of 1965. Roger and I have kept in touch over the years and have met from time to time in Chicago and Milwaukee and also in the UK. Roger had received our Christmas card telling him of our World Voyage and emailed us to wish us well. He said that he was taking his first cruise this month, leaving from Miami on 12 January – the very day that we arrive just down the road in Fort Lauderdale. It must be 10/15 years or so since we last met. Fate has put us in the same place on the same day, so we hope to have coffee or lunch together before he boards his ship and sails off to the Caribbean.
Apologies for the lack of photos but iCloud is misbehaving.