Grand Africa Cruise - Third Times the Charm???

Thursday, October 6, 2022

We are headed to Africa, finally!!  

In July of 2019 Val and I received a flyer from Holland America announcing the 74 day Grand Africa cruise sailing in October of 2020. The cruise left from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, circled the African continent visiting 23 ports, and then returning to Fort Lauderdale.  We had always wanted to visit Africa, but with Val’s aversion to flying overseas we never thought we’d make it, but this cruise looked like the perfect opportunity for us so we immediately booked it.

A Holland America Grand Cruise is a special type of cruise that is usually quite long and has a unique itinerary.  Examples of other Grand Cruises are the Grand South American Cruise, the Grand Asian Cruise and the longest of all, the Grand World Cruise.  Some, such as the World Cruise, happen every year, but others only happen occasionally; the Grand Africa hadn’t been offered for five years.  We have never been on a Grand Cruise before, but we have been told they are very special with a lot of perks to go along with the great itinerary.

By the end of 2019, we were well into our preparation, booking many independent tours as well as ship tours.  The most exciting thing for us was a five day safari we booked in South Africa.  An African safari had been on my bucket list for a long time. 

Unfortunately, in early 2020 we began hearing about the Corona Virus and by March of 2020 we were all in lockdown.  We hoped it would all be over by summer and we could go on our cruise, but as we all know now, that was very wishful thinking.  We questioned whether it would be safe for us to take the cruise, but by June it was taken out of our hands and the cruise was cancelled and postponed until October of 2021.

We thought certainly the pandemic would be over by October of 2021, so we transferred most of our tours to 2021, but by the spring of 2021, it was obvious that the corona virus was not going away any time soon and our cruise was once again postponed and rescheduled for October of 2022.  Once again, we cancelled some of our tours (the itinerary had changed slightly and cut to 71 days), rescheduled others and hoped for the best in 2022.

So here we are; two original vaccinations and three boosters later and we are ready to go.  All we have to do is take a Covid test tomorrow and if it's negative we will be flying to Fort Lauderdale on Saturday and boarding the Holland America Zaandam on Monday, October the 10^th.  A lot is riding on the Covid test, we have been very careful the last few weeks; wearing masks everywhere, minimizing our contact with others and staying isolated as much as possible, but we are still pretty nervous and anxious about it.  If we should test positive, we will not be allowed to board and our Grand Africa cruise will be over before it starts, but if you are reading this, we must have passed and are on our way.

A map of our cruise itinerary.

One of the perks of a Grand Cruise is we can ship our luggage at no cost to us so most of our luggage has been gone since last week. “All” we have left to do is pack our camera gear, electronics, medications, clothing and toiletries for Fort Lauderdale and take care of all the other little (and big) things we think we need for being away from home for 71 days.  We are still remembering things to do, setting up having our house looked after (thank you so much Marsha!), and a bunch of other details, but by Friday night it’ll all be done and we’ll be ready to leave bright and early (4:00 AM) Saturday morning (assuming our Covid tests come back negative).

I have been asked by several people if I will be doing the blog live and unfortunately the answer is no; if you are reading this we are already home.  I would love to do it live as it would be a lot more fun that way especially knowing people were following along on our adventure, but the truth is, it just doesn’t work out that well for me to do it live.  I do write a blog entry every day as we travel as that allows me to have everything fresh in my memory, but going through our photos, picking out which ones to use, and preparing them for publishing, plus the slow internet speed on the ship just takes a lot of time.  I have done it live in the past, but I have found it takes just too much of my vacation time working on the blog and takes away from my enjoyment of the trip so I haven’t done it live for quite a few years.

This has turned out to be a pretty long introduction for our trip, but it has been a long time in the making.  Anyway, barring a disastrous Covid test, it looks like we are finally going to Africa so I guess the old saying is correct, the third time really is the charm.