When we disembarked from the ship on Saturday morning, we had an hour or so to look around Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. Then headed to the airport for our “on time” flight to Toronto. Not sure why we had such bad luck with flying on this trip. Went to the gate when summonsed only to find complete chaos. We stood and stood until it was announced that the plane had “mechanical problems” that they were hoping to fix in a timely manner. Air Canada kept bumping up the departure time by 30 to 40 minutes at a time. This “death by a thousand cuts” made it difficult to leave the crowded gate area because we didn’t know when we might actually start boarding. Originally we were supposed to depart Barbados at 4pm, getting into Toronto around 9pm (a 5 hour flight). Ultimately, we departed just before 11 pm arriving at 3:36 am, beating even our previous delay time from Toronto to St.Vincent. At least we weren’t sitting on the plane this time! We arrived in Toronto in the middle of the night but fortunately our hotel had held our room.
After a very short night’s sleep we met up with family for a lovely brunch and catch-up. We were mighty nervous about what would happen with that evening’s flight to Vancouver. Amazingly, though we left 20 minutes late, we arrived a few minutes early. It was 1am body-time when we finally arrived at our doorstep.
Ultimately, we did have a wonderful trip and an excellent time sailing. The five-masted Royal Clipper ship was amazing. As may be seen from our feature image, our country count has been updated by two for the new countries that we visited. All of our posts can be seen on our Page for our Royal Clipper Caribbean Cruise.
Although one of our first posts for this trip showed our departure in snowy conditions in both Vancouver and Toronto, at least here on Canada’s west coast winter snows appear to be over!
