Bill's Epilogue

The only low bit on the the whole holiday was Iberia losing our largest suitcase and then - after they'd located and delivered it - finding that they must have abandoned it on the tarmac during the cloudburst at the time of our boarding at the terribly disorganised Rio International Airport because the clothes in the top half were totally saturated. Luckily the wet hadn't quite reached Val's souvenir watercolour pictures and photographs.



The whole of the rest of the holiday was like skipping from peak to peak on the Andean summits. How can you pick the best of the best? I guess making friends with all those people - Mike and Margaret, Val and Keith, Jim and Ellen, Dermot (can't spell it the Irish way as he does) and Ann, Rachel, Mike the Cruise Director, DJ Drew and all the wonderful ship's stewards - must rate tops of all. But it's closely followed by my tango in La Boca (my - what a sexy dance!) the glaciers down the Beagle Channel, rounding Cape Horn and Val taking over as DJ in the Crow's Nest.

I'm really glad that we did it. It has been the best just-the-two-of-us holiday ever. Very skeptical over the idea of cruising ("cooped up at sea with a lot of people even older than me") for a long time, I am a total convert now. Geographically and historically it was just so, so fascinating. And it was great for the nostalgia of visiting again where Duncan's then Shana's great American adventure started - the juncture at which the Horner clan finally uprooted from the head of a Yorkshire river where their ancestors' Viking longboat ran aground so many generations ago - and crossed the "big pond"!