Sayonara until...

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7_Jan 27 Sayonara until I find some free internet

I’m sure you thought my choice of photos was peculiar in the last blog (Rangiroa). The reason is, I aborted the photo upload after about 30 minutes (more than $15) of exquisitely slow internet connection, with only two photos uploaded. It makes me nervous to burn money at this pace, so this is my last post until we reach some civilized place with free wifi; maybe New Zealand, maybe Australia, maybe Detroit. My e-mail is even worse; I am not going to burn money at this snail’s pace, bringing in the 90% of my emails asking for political donations, or trying to scare me about Republicans. So here are a few personal messages:



Dear Gail and Don Dawson:

We very much want to see you in Auckland. I tried to email you, but when I hit send, it just went into the Outbox, not the Sent box. So I’m pretty sure you did not get it. The schedule says we will dock at 8 AM on Feb 2, and we must board again by 5 PM. Much too brief for your wonderful city, but that is what they say. So we will come down onto the pier at a civilized hour, say 9 AM. Carol will be wearing her colorful striped hat, and I will have a hiking pole. We think we will recognize you, but it has been a while. Thanks so much for your generous offer to show us your city.



Dear Sister Meredith:

You are most assuredly on the blog list. I cannot guess why you are not receiving, but I’m glad that you are getting the refs from Uta. Just depend on her until reasonable internet connectivity obtains. Maybe there is some tiny mistake in your address as recorded on TravelBlog. But I would have to too hurriedly flub about to verify it while at sea. Hope that Spring is already around the corner in Lubbock.



After another full day at sea, we had some mild excitement yesterday at Raritonga. The surf was up, and they had trouble securing the tender dock to the ship. So we sailed 15 or 20 minutes around to a more protected site on the other side of the island, where things worked better. A few tender loads got ashore, but this site was not familiar to the tender operators and it was not long before one of them (fortunately, not ours) got stuck on a coral reef. Then it tilted, and sea water started pouring in through the very low doors of the tender. The tide was falling and they could not free themselves, so most of the passengers had to be rescued by rubber life raft. Finally, it was light enough to push off from the reef, and the tender came back to the ship, all aboard with wet feet and legs, and one person injured by a fall. After that, no more tenders went ashore. I will eventually have some pictures of Raritonga for you. There is more to it than on Rangiroa, even a bit of automobile traffic. The town is the “capital” of the Cook islands, but still French.





Sayonara— Martin and Carol

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