Last port : Funchal, Madeira, Portugal

Wonderful excursion here. This is a stunningly beautiful place, red tiled roofs on pastel houses scattered all over the steep slopes of the volcanic mountains that make up the islands of Madeira, with carefully maintained terraces where they grow bananas and sugar cane and, of course, grapes from which to make Madeira wines. (Looking down one almost vertical set of terraces, our guide shared the local joke about such fields: "You only ever fall once.") The annual flower festival is this weekend, and someone made damned sure the flowers knew about it. Even more variety than in Sicily. Jacaranda trees lining the streets with their elegant blue-violet flowers, and yellow and pink and orange and red and white flowers whose names slipped past too fast for me to catch onto them. Our morning took us up 1000 meters into the Nuns' Valley*, on a twisty little road that had half the bus cowering down in their seats to keep from having to see just how near the edge we were and just how far it was from "up here" to "way down there". (Another local joke: "Our roads may be narrow, but they are elastic -- there's always room." Our driver, Victor, had been driving tour buses along Madeiran mountain roads for 21 years and was nonetheless a calm, elegant, and personable man.)

*The Nuns' Valley got its name when some 15th century nuns hid there from the pirates who raided the island seeking the gold and silver Madeira got from the sale of sugar. The guide told us a story of the aged Mother Superior who accompanied the nuns in their flight. "They say she carried all the monastery's treasure with her. Before she died, she buried it. It has never been found." It is the kind of story where the "They" in "They say" may possibly refer to the current membership of the Union of Licensed Madeiran Tour Guides.

And then we stopped for lunch.

My experience of excursion lunches led me to expect an indifferent buffet including one, count them, one glass of wine OR beer OR soft drink, any additional potable to be paid for by the consumer. Well. We had lunch at Villa Cypriani, a restaurant attached to the Ritz (no, really, the Ritz) Hotel. We ate out on the balcony overlooking Funchal Bay from a height of several hundred feet, allowing us to see other islands of the Madeira Archipelago and to watch a replica of one of Christopher Columbus' ships sail by. The service was impeccable; the food -- a pasta dish, a main course of chicken plus side dishes, a tiramisu dessert plus petit fours and coffee -- was delectable; and both the white wine served with the first course and the red served with the second were excellent. The wait staff seemed to consider it a personal insult if they saw anyone's glass approaching half empty, and they promptly and gracefully corrected the problem as often as it occurred.

I most likely won't be going to dinner tonight. Instead, I think I'll find a place on deck to sit and watch us sail away from Funchal. It is the last land I'll see until we dock in Florida on the 28th, and the last point in the voyage where I can feel this pampered and irresponsible. Tomorrow I will be trying to figure out how to get everything I brought plus everything I bought into luggage that bulged when I arrived -- was it less than four months ago?