Woke up to a beautiful day in Freeport, Grand Bahama. 26C and a blue blue sky. We planned to go to a nearby beach so after breakfast we grabbed out beach bags and headed out. The ship was not moored up in town but in a pretty ugly port area, surrounded by gas storage tanks! Not the most scenic. Anyway, normally the ship runs a shuttle bus in such circumstances to take passengers through the dockyard and into town…. but not today. We were going to take a taxi to the beach anyway and we’d looked online and found it was $14 per cab round trip.

Unfortunately there weren’t any regular taxis there, just mini buses who were grouping people into 10-16s and cramming them in and charging $20 each person for the privilege. We tried to set off walking but it was just too far so in the end we turned back and – like a few others we met – we got back on board and had a lovely day around the pool which was very quiet. The ship is not at all full at this point. Over 600 people got off in Fort Lauderdale yesterday. It’s really nice. So peaceful around the pool. We had a lot of swims and spent all day there. Also enjoyed free soft drinks, coffee and tea and lunch which of course we wouldn’t have got at the beach. Would have liked a last swim in the sea but it was not to be….

At lunchtime the Captain announced that we would be staying an extra 2 hours in Freeport and that they were monitoring weather ahead near our next port which was Bermuda. Got a bit of a bad feeling and sure enough at 7pm he came back on and said that the weather forecast for Wednesday was really windy and wet with extremely high winds en route so reluctantly we would not be going there. Instead, he is taking a southerly path around the storm which will keep us in warmer weather for the next few days en route to the Azores our next stop now in 8 days….. Yikes. Never mind, if you’ve got a lot of sea days there’s only one line to travel and that’s Cunard. We wont be bored that’s for sure.

tonight we had a great Motown and Soul show from a singer called Nate Simpson who’d been on X Factor and Eurovision and appeared in the west end several times. What an amazing voice he had. Tremendous performer. He’s on again next week so looking forward to that.

So a funny day. Not what we expected but we did enjoy ourselves.