After a day at sea we arrived in Funchal. The forecast was for rain so we took our
raincoats with us when we left the ship.
We had nothing in particular to see, so we just walked into town to look
around. Funchal is a really beautiful,
clean city with lots of trees and parks.
The mountains rise steeply behind it, and there are houses almost all
the way up. In town we found the market,
which was fun. There were lots of
produce stands with a lot of tropical fruits we'd never seen. We bought some assorted dried fruit to take
with us for snacks. There was a large
fish market with some of the ugliest fish I've ever seen. We had lunch at a little outdoor cafe, then
walked around looking for gelato. After
a walk uphill we found the historic Reid Hotel overlooking the harbor. We then walked back down the hill, still
looking for gelato. We never did find
any, but we spotted something else really amazing. Anyone who lives in Tucson
know the name Truly Nolen as the local pest control company that has antique
cars all over town. In Funchal we saw a
little yellow VW bug with mouse ears. It
was a Truly Nolen car! We've since
learned that they have companies all over the world. It turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day with
not a drop of rain. And for the third
time we left a country with wonderful memories.
At 5:00, which was supposed to
be our departure time, the captain announced that we had a problem with one of
our emergency generators. He expected
that they would be able to fix it and we'd sail at 6:00. We finally
left at 6:15. It turned out to be a good thing, because by
then it was dark. As we sailed out we
looked out from the stern of the ship.
The mountains were covered with thousands of lights from all the
houses. It was positively magical.
Miles walked: 5.4
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