Stairs and More Stairs and Funchal, Madeira

We spent the day today in the city of Funchal which is the capital city of Madeira, Portugal which is located about 300 miles of the west coast of Africa, the nearest city is Casablanca but more on this later.

First my rant about stairs. I am getting so tired of climbing stairs. Our cabin is in the middle of the ship and it is a walk the length of a football field to the forward stairs, a walk the length of a football field (about 100 meters) to the aft (back) stairs and there is ½ a football field forward of the forward stairs and ½ a football field aft of the aft stairs making this ship 3 football fields long.

Now our cabin is on deck 9, breakfast and lunch are usually on 11 but sometimes on 4, dinner is on 5 all at the back of the ship, the pool is on 11 midships, the gym is on 11 forward, the climbing wall is on 12 aft, the flowrider on 12 aft, mini golf is on 12 aft, the promenade with the shops etc is on 5 between the fore and aft stairs, the skating rink is on 2, the theatre on 3, the running rack on 12 but by now you get the drift.

There are 14 stairs between decks up to 11 and then 16 stairs for upper decks after that. I have lost track of the number of stairs up and down we have climbed since the start of this cruise.

Now that I am done with this it is a %%*I*( good thing that we have all these stairs or I would have gained a pile of weight by now.

Our trip from Porta Delgada to Funchal was 480 miles for a new total of 6169 miles.

Funcal was first settled in 1578 by the spanish and then like Porta Delgada went through a number of changes to English rule, back to Spanish, one more tour as Portugese and then through them all again until the mid 1990's when it was declared an independent state of Portugal.

We skipped by by the cabs at the dock (who wanted about 170 Euro or a tour) and walked our way to downtown (about 2 miles) where we picked up an hop on / hop off narrated tour bus where we can ride, get off to look around and then get back on again for 20 Euro total. This took us about 3 ½ hours after which we went for Lunch in downtown at a local restaurant.

We had an order of Calimari Fritta and I will likely never have the same again, this was the msot tender calimari we have ever had. We joined this with a Madeira fish dish (dont know what it was but it was a whole fish, split down the middle and grilled and then served in this case with french fries. We topped this with a fresh green salad, garlic bread and a small carafe (about 1 litre) of local Madeira red wine. In all, a lunch fit for a king a queen.

After lunch we walked up and down the streets doing a bunch of shopping and then a walk back to the boat for a dip in the pool before we departed for our next to last stop of Vigo, Spain where we dock early in the morning on Thursday.

After this we will be on our last leg and sadly this part of our journey will end on Saturday but the next phase of Paris and London begins.

It is hard to believe that 3 weeks have almost already gone by and the last week of our journey begins soon.