• Miami -> Sint Maarten -> BVI

Dearest Reader:

Once upon a time, long, long ago, well 24 hrs actually, the world as I knew it ceased to exist. That is when I embarked onto Seabourn’s Ovation.

But first, practicalities, the suite is wonderful – so big! Who knew?! Like the first time you travel Business – you can’t go back to Cattle. So, bye to Celebrity.

So, now the story….

Let’s be clear: I did not travel to Sint Maarten. I survived my way there.

It started with a 30-minute, 100mph Uber blur from Fort Lauderdale to Miami — a journey so brief and so violent it barely qualified as transportation and more as being fired from a cannon in the general direction of an airport. I arrived at the gate dishevelled and slightly feral.

Then: Cattle Class. Two hours and seventeen minutes of what the aviation industry optimistically calls seating. My companions were generous souls who breathed with the enthusiasm of people who had only recently discovered oxygen and were not about to take it for granted. I disembarked technically alive but spiritually rearranged. Never again – I’ve already upgraded myself to First for my return to MIA.

Sint Maarten! Beautiful, sun-drenched, and — this is the part nobody mentions in the brochures — possessed of ports. Plural. And I, with my usual quiet confidence and superiority of someone who absolutely should have read the instructions, went to the wrong one first. An hour later — wiser, sweatier, and considerably more Caribbean in my outlook — I arrived the right one.

My luggage, however, had other plans. Six hours passed. Six full hours during which I was in my all black outfit and in which my bag was presumably having a better trip than I was – it certainly looked a bit rough when it finally arrived. At around the four our mark, the situation had escalated to the point where Seabourn — Seabourn — rang to ask if I had my luggage – three times over the next 2 hours. They were touching calls. Very caring. The answer was no. We moved on.

But here is where the story pivots — sharply and gloriously — because aboard this ship, Americans were thin on the ground. Save for Tom and Robin from North Carolina, who were an absolute delight and who I shall defend with my life, the passenger manifest read like a phone book from Glasgow and, oddly, Ardrie. Scots. Everywhere. At the bar, in the corridors, on the decks — opinionated, hilarious, magnificently unfiltered Scots, each one a conversational gift wrapped in a fleece.

By the time the bar reached its full, glorious, barely-controlled mania, I had completely forgotten I owned luggage.

Fourteen days of this.

I cannot wait.