The adventure begins

The adventure begins when there is no turning back. The doors closed. The stewardesses walked down the aisle checking that our seatbelts were fastened. Then we pulled away from the gate. All I could think was: what have I forgotten? As far as I could discern I hadn’t forgotten much. Certainly not anything Mr. MasterCard couldn’t fix.

The weeks up till when we flew had flown by … There had been much to do, but it felt like I also had plenty of time to do it, so I had worked on my “to-do” list at a leisurely pace. That worked well till the last week, when reality caught up with me and I realized that I was fast running out of time. I had one week left to pack up all my stuff and move it out of my apartment, clean the apartment properly, pack a pallet filled with sails, windvane, and a bunch of other stuff that we were sending by seafreight to Curacao, prepare a sailaway party for what looked like would be between 80-100 people, pack the stuff I was bringing with me and finally board the airplane. All of a sudden one week wasn’t a lot of time. To sum it up: I made it, but wouldn’t have gotten any sleep if Margrethe hadn’t been there to help me. We were exhausted from late hours and early mornings, but had accomplished everything we had put on our lists.

I did my normal PPP test in the airline seat: Penger, pikk og pass. Nothing was missing, so I could breath out a sigh of relief. We had a couple of hours in Oslo, before we boarded the Dreamliner bound for Fort Lauderdale. In a true patriotic spirit we were flying with Norwegian.

In Fort Lauderdale, Pam Wall picked us up at the airport and brought us back to her fantastic house, 10 minutes from the airport. She had made a delicious pot roast that we wolfed down. Then we went to work on the mountain of goods, we had gotten mailed to her house. It felt like Christmas, only better, because everything there will be of great help during our sailing trip.

Pam made our short stay in Fort Lauderdale very memorable. It was great to talk to her and learn from her vast cruising experience, both from circumnavigating, but also from working for West Marine for 22 years. She made sure that our bags were bursting and we tiptoed on the weight limit on our bags when we flew to Trinidad. I know that we have made a life long friend and I can’t wait to meet Pam again.

It felt great to take our seats on the Caribbean Airlines flight to Port of Spain, because then we knew: our adventure was starting in earnest.