Sun, 3/23/25    Funchal Madeira

Day 77 - Sunday, March 23rd, 2025 – Funchal, Madeira

As they type this or dictate this the ship is rocking and rolling like you would not believe. I'm having a hard time sitting behind my desk. The creaking is loud. The curtains are moving back and forth so much that they're generating a wind. I can just imagine that the transfer into bed tonight is going to be somewhat of a circus act. Hopefully, once we get into the Mediterranean tomorrow things will quiet down, Hoping.

Today was going to be one of those mystery days. We had a plan, but we weren't sure how it would play out. Mary purchased tickets for the hop on hop off bus. We verified that the bus would have a ramp. All good so far. It was about 55°. Thankfully the sun was out. That helped.  The ship docked at 8:00. We had breakfast in the room. We were off the ship by about 8:30. Mary forgot her phone, so she had to run back and get it. It's not a big deal. Thankfully she remembered it before we got on the bus. We made our way to the bus area. Yes, the bus did have a ramp. It was a short and stubby ramp so getting on the bus was more of a shove. There's no real instruction from the driver. He puts the bus into drive, and he drives. We were given a map that is difficult to understand. Every so often we see what we think are stops but he goes right past. Little later he stops the bus completely. People get out and take pictures. So Mary gets some nice pictures. We’re looking for a big shopping center that happens to be #22 on the map. We have no idea where we are on the map. As he blows by the bus stops you can see the number of inner circle on the sign. So, long story short, we miss the shopping center. We made the complete loop back. We talked to the driver and said we wanted to stop at the shopping center. He said he did stop there but no one got off. So now we were faced with the decision of going back out into the loop getting dropped off at the shopping center. Because it was already late morning the bus wasn't going to leave again for another 45 minutes, we were a little worried about timing. After several minutes of back and forth we decided that I was going to get off the bus. We then agreed to both get off the bus and go to the room. We decided that Mary would go back out on her own to see if she could get some stuff accomplished.

I do have to say that the loop we made on the bus was interesting. We saw a lot of Funchal. We were able to see several of the viewpoints. We did see the downtown area and the residential areas. It is a very hilly area. Had we got off the bus at any point we would have been facing huge hills. In hindsight, it's probably better I did not get off. The two-hour loop was enough for me to say I saw the Funchal.

I stayed in the room and watched Netflix. Mary went back out and decided to take the shuttle into the center of town. The shuttle was different than the hop on hop off bus. The shuttle goes one way into town and one way back. She got quite a bit accomplished. She got a refrigerator magnet and T-shirts. She did not find postcards though. It was Sunday and a lot stuff was closed. She was able to find a few of the essentials that we need, like Listerine and body soap. Two bottles of Madeira port wine jumped into her cart. We will have to try this one day at home. The cool thing is that she was able to take a cable car ride from one end of town to the other and back. I don't know how long it was, but she was able to take a ton of pictures from her pie. She was disappointed in the whole bus thing. I was too. It is what it is.

We looked at the menu in the restaurant dining room and nothing appealed to us. We decided to go up to 14. I had a bowl of soup. It was kind of strange that it was a cut up hot dog in a chicken broth. I'm not sure who came up with that idea but it kind of worked. Mary had her salad. We both had bruschetta. A leykey ingredient is balsamic vinegar. This did not have that, so it was not that good. I had chocolate pudding for dessert. Mary heads some type of blueberry. We ran into Brenda. We talked to her for a bit. She was going to the show.

Back in the room. We're both hanging on toward desks for dear life. We're afraid to move the 10 feet to the bed. Actually, it's not that bad, but it's probably the worst it's been. Since I started this entry the wind is picked up so now we have the whistling wind and the creaking ship as it bounces through the North Atlantic. Are we having fun yet?