It is a few minutes before 4 a.m. as I write this on Monday, and I am getting ready to leave for the airport. Mark and my mother came over yesterday night for dinner, and Mark stayed over and will be driving me to the airport. I have a 6:30 flight to LaGuardia in New York. As a result of a regretted last-minute flight change beyond my control, my former booking of flying to JFK on an 8:30 a.m. flight was cancelled. In its place I was given a flight two hours earlier to NYC’s other airport. No one wants to travel this early, then have to crisscross the city at rush hour and go through airport security a second time. I will not be at peace until I am on my 11:15 flight out of JFK for Johannesburg. I am scheduled to arrive in Cape Town at 14:15 on Tuesday. Wednesday will be a day of rest where I won’t do any sightseeing but I do have to take care of some very important business. I will first head to the bank to pay for my ship passage, then transmit the receipt to the ship’s office headquarters (my hotel office staff can help me with that) and then I will visit the S. A. Agulhas II in port at East Pier and surrender my passport. I have to give up my passport 24 hours before departure. I will walk to East Pier to get an idea how far it is from the hotel. I must be at the Pier by noon on Thursday with departure for Tristan at 14:00 (or 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time). I do not know if the S. A. Agulhas II will have a public Internet station on board like M. S. Finnmarken during our Norwegian cruise (since the Agulhas after all is a private research vessel and not a public cruise ship) but I definitely will write aboard the ship if I can.

The journey to Tristan da Cunha commences!