Thursday, June 28, 2018

Sailing day Southhampton England

FYI:  The vacation posts will have a lot of photos so I am going to make them smaller in the posts.  You can make them larger by clicking on them and just scrolling though the photos themselves.  Or individually.  Some of them are very well worth making larger!

The plan was to take a flight from Baton Rouge to Houston, then we had first class tickets from Houston to London directly.  But the Baton Rouge flight took off almost an hour late and we missed the connection in Houston by 5 minutes.

We always build a day into our travel in case of disasters and we needed nearly every second of this one.


We were put on the 4:30 pm direct Houston/Heathrow flight (didn't make it on), then on the 8:30 pm direct Houston/Heathrow flight (got cancelled), then on an 11:30 pm flight to Washington DC Dulles  to sleep overnight in the terminal waiting for the 7 am London flight the next day.

We had no idea we would be on the Washington Dulles flight, we wondered if our luggage knew it would need to be on that flight as well.  We wondered if we would ever see it again because we knew we would be in no place to be able to receive the luggage.

 Finally we made it to London after a 12 hour flight, Frank in the back of the plane sitting next to a very young woman with a 6 month old baby, both of whom cried the  entire light.  And me in the middle section of the plane watching 3 movies trying not to wake the people on either side of me.  Obviously not first class.



We had planned on touring around London a bit but that didn't happen!  Alas, Big Ben.

On Friday, as we rode the bus to the pier we passed at least 3 Ikeas!  The Costco stores I saw Norway and Iceland had 3 stories! Wow!

We were sailing on the Norwegian Jade, a ship we had been on several times before in various locations in Alaska and the Caribbean. 

As we left the Southhampton pier, we were reminded of another famous ship that had also sailed from that great city so many years ago, heading on nearly the same path as we were taking toward Iceland.....the Titanic.  Luckily the passengers on the Jade had a happier cruise.



 It was a clear day when we left port. If I owned a sailboat like this, I would greet the passengers on cruise ships too!  What a lovely way to spend a weekend outing.

As we were sipping our tea and eating crumpets on Deck 12, I don't think I had found those amazing brownies yet, when I realized a thick fog was rolling in.



We watched the cloud come over the ship as the foghorn sounded.  We went from clear day to heavy cloud overhead.  I have never seen a fog like this. 
As the Jade went deeper into the the fog you could see the layers from the ocean looking up to the clearer atmosphere.

I have a number of sunset photos if anyone is into that, let me know, I can share with you.  I play with screwing up the camera settings and taking a bunch of them. 
As we walked down Deck 7 Promenade it was unbelievable to see the fog thick enough to obscure the ship a quarter of the way down the deck.

We sailed like this throughout the night. This was not the only time we would run into this incredible fog on this  trip.

Next stop, Bergen Norway.




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