Barbados, West Indies

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Saturday 13th December, 2014 - Barbados, West Indies

On the Friday night we made our way to some friends who live in Epsom who had kindy offered to put us up for the night, store our car and act as taxi service the next morning. Thanks Rosemarie and Philip.

The flight left without a hitch, the airport having caught up with the flight delays from the evening before (when a computer failure had caused all of London's airspace to be shut down)! We travelled on a Boeing Dreamliner which was a first for us. It was quite nice with plenty of leg-room and daylight. We landed after 8 and a half hours and disembarked straight onto a coach which took us to the ship which took about 40 minutes.

We had time to go in to Bridgetown but decided to give it a miss as we were exhausted. Instead we tried to familiarise ourselves with the ship. She is a P & O vessel called Azura and is absolutely huge. We don't like the big cruise liners much but decided that this would do for a couple of weeks. At 6.00 pm we had the mandatory General Emergency and Evacuation Drill. This was a bit different from our previous experiences. We all collected our life jackets and made our way to the ship's theatre. Someone at the front demonstrated how to put them on, we all had a go, and that was it! No role call or being taken to the designated lifeboats as we had experienced before. Our luggage arrived in time to change and dress for dinner. Dresscode was casual. We are on freedom dining which means we can go and eat pretty much when we want but that we don't have set table companions - we just eat with whosoever arrives at the same time as us. After dinner we crashed out. It was around 4 am in the morning British time.

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