Laundry, lunches and loopy Internet

A flight of wines in the Glass House

The evening began with rain. Was this a forerunner of what would greet us at home or, worse, at Ponta Delgada? The sky lowered and the rain dropped off the balcony archway onto the seating below. This is really the first time that we’ve seen proper rain for months. And so we headed to, you’ve guessed it, the Glass House, for dinner as the main restaurant menu was uninspiring to say the least. 

A sea day with (a lot of) drink

Crossing the equator, 30 seconds later

With a layer of body lotion, sun cream, Deet and then even more sun cream, there was, unsurprisingly, an even thicker layer of grime which had to be shifted when we got back from our trip yesterday evening. I hadn’t eaten much at lunchtime on our trip, quite simply because it was just too hot to eat. Neither of us fancied going out last night, so we continued wading through the massive fruit bowl Steevan had left for us. There were no shows of interest, so it ended up being a moany-groany-sighy-dressingowny sort of evening wallowing in a very bubbly bath and hunkering down.

All at sea with extreme ironing

A sea day today, so the morning dawned bright and early - around 7:30am, which is astonishingly early for us when we don’t have to get up - and we planned our activities. The day began with Gabrielle doing her exercises and me ensuring that Amy (her Personal Trainer) was aware that it was happening. Given the lack of equipment for this workout, Gabrielle resorted to two 500ml tins of water as weights and waved them around with determination and to great effect. As she normally uses two 5kg weights, this is rather letting her off easily!

South America landfall at Recife

Gabrielle was eager to get on the bus!

We docked at Recife around 7am local time. It’s a city of some 4 million inhabitants, the capital of the Pernambuco state of Brazil and is referred to as “The Venice of Brazil” because of its many rivers and waterways. It’s close to the easternmost point of South America … and, yes, I have been checking up on Google. However, our initial view was of the breakwater and dirty brown sea with floating detritus. Not the best welcome for our first landfall in South America. What was I expecting? Inca temples? Mayan ruins. Wrong country and wrong location, Nick!