This is a new Italian ship in a fleet of 11 fantastic ships. If you have never been on an Italian ship, then you don’t know what you are missing.

If you interested you need to hurry and put a deposit down as there are only limited cabins at the following prices.

Inside $609 plus port and taxes

Balcony -Standard $1,055 plus port and taxes.

>>> I will be there just relaxing on the balcony <<<

For 8 days/7nights these prices are the best I have found in some time.

If you are interested leave a comment with a valid email and I will get back to you

You can check the cruise line out online at: New Years Cruise

I had been to Mexico and Canada, but those countries have common borders with the U.S.A.

In 1968 St. Thomas was nothing like it is today with regard to the population and its popularity as a tourist destination. Actually I was part of the introduction of tourism to St.Thomas.

The airport is located on the west side of the island and is just a relatively short landing strip with mountians on 3 sides. Now I have a couple of interesting photos. The first one below is the airport as it is tody, 2008

The photo below is a modified photo as the airport looked in 1968. I could not find my photos of that year. As you can see the airport was quite a bit shorter, actually total length was 5,000′. Now it’s double that length.

I left the employ of TCA in Jan. 1970. The photo below is one of a TCA B727 that overran the runway on landing.

When I left the employ of TCA (Trans Caribbean Airways)I actually moved to live in St. Thomas. This is a photo I had a friend take of me at the crash site. The VW Bug was the car I had in St. Thomas at the time and that is me standing on the hill near the wreckage. Obviously security in those days is not what it is today. LOL.

Eventually I went to work for Prinair Airlines

… that served San Jaun,PR, St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. John and Tortola.

During my time in St.Thomas I actually purchased a 65′ Schooner Primrose IV sailboat, but that is another story.

I got back into the left seat of a B727 with Dominicana Airlines

as part of a managed operations contract with Boeing Aircraft Corp. Travel is my thing whether it is a job or just for pleasure. these days it is more for pleasure. I thought everyone would be interested in a little history. One of these days I will tell everyone about my days with Primrose IV and Boca Chica during which time I was driving a B727 for Dominicana Airlines with a couple of other pilots from the old TCA that American Airlines bought in 1970.

I found a niche where they needed the import of fresh fruit and vegs, so I went to Miami, rented me a DC3 (all this was before Home Security aka Gxxxxxx (you fill in the blanks LOL) and went to Puerto. I already had an Airline Transport Rating in jets, so the old piston aircraft was not to difficult.

Anyway once I got to PR, I went to NY Hunts Point market and made a connection to export a container of fruits and vegs to PR once a week. I then would fly these fruits and vegs at the rate of 8,000 lbs per trip to St. Maarten, NL (Dutch) and St. Martin (French) to supply the local hotels and markets. It was growing, building like crazy in those days. It would take about 3-4 trips to unload a container.

This went great until a guy flying a Connie (Constellation Super Constellation C-69 / C-121) with hotel labor back and forth to Miami, decided he wanted to get some extra money and started carrying passengers and charging them. This was not legal.

Anyway the government found out and told him to stop. He didn’t. They told him a couple more times, he didn’t. So the government closed the whole airport to any charter flights, regardless, so that meant my operation was shut down.

Being kinda stubborn, I decided there must be a way. It dawned on me that Anguilla was only 11 miles off the north coast of the island. So I started flying my cargo there, off loaded it to a truck, then a boat to get it to my customers. In the meantime I went to Curacao, the seat of the government for the Dutch islands and started a campaign to get my landing rights reinstated. After about 2 weeks I was successful, so I was back flying direct again.

What an experience. Glad I was young and full of energy. Writing this brought back all those memories. I guess I enjoyed it, but at the time I didn’t think so. LOL I took vitamins in those days and still take them. I get mine on line from a great company at Vitamins Plus

Thanks for listening

One thing that you never see in a hotel conference (it was at the Hilton) is an “all organic lunch”. Really, EVERYTHING served was organic. The organizer was Ann Fonfa and she really did a great job with the conference and especially the lunch. There were some cranberry/walnut cookies that would be hard to beat.

In Roman times, Libya was where the well-to-do went for holiday. In fact the Romans unified all three regions of Libya, and the whole area was a region controlled by Rome for more than 600 years. There were wars but Rome had an interest and influence in Libya from 40AD to about 600AD. There is evidence like the theatre in the Roman city of Sabratha, west of Tripoli. There is also the Arch of Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus (AD 146-211) in Leptis Magna. In fact Leptis Magna is the biggest preserved roman city in the world. Its not like the sites in Italy where your movement is quite restricted. All the ruins in Libya are quite open, at least they were when I was there over 20 years ago. It looks like that will be changing. Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya, announced in 2005 that he is going to showcase Libya to the world. Up until that time Leptis Magna is a magnificent Roman town on the Mediterranean yet it is little visited by tour groups, thanks to its location

Although I have some personal photos, I found a blog with some excellent greek ruins photos that some views of the sites much better that the ones I have.I was contracted as an aviation consultant to the newly commissioned Libyan Arab Airlines. I left the country in November 1972 just a few months before a Boeing 727 was down by Israeli air forces on February 21, 1973, that suspected the civilian jet was an enemy plane. Among 113 on board 1 crew member and 4 passengers survived.

When I was there alcohol was illegal and that means no real night clubs or bars. It was a very strict Islamic society similar to Iran under Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Libya is a paradise now- VIDEO

It beats Mount Dora, north of Orlando just off US 441 by 101 feet. Mount Dora is only 184 feet above sea level.

Florida’s Bok Tower is not to be confused with the BOK Tower in Tulsa, Oklahoma which is a 52-story tower 667 feet in height. In fact it is the tallest building in the “Plains States” of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

But I digress, back to Florida. The Bok Tower is well known as The Singing Tower. Resplendent in the water-colored photographs, the tower looked like something from a fairy tale. There is an inscription at the Tower that says “Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it.”  Edward Bok ordred the commissioned the inscriptin on the advise of his Dutch grandmother. The Tower is built to hold 65 tons of bells so it unlikely that any Florida hurricane will touch it. So far that is the case, even hurrican Charley has no effect.

In 1869 the young Edward William Bok (1863 - 1930) arrived in Brooklyn, New York from den Helder, in the Netherlands. He retired in 1919 after a 30-year distinguished career at the Ladies Home Jounal magazine and in 1922 purchased a large tract of scrub and pine land on Iron Mountain, a 298′ high prominence located near Lake Wales, Florida. Under construction for over 5 years, the garden was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge on February 1, 1929.

The tower impresses me as typical Florida Deco. I walked the gardens for over 3 hours listening to several mini-concerts of the carillon’s bells. The carillonneur, the musician who plays a carillon, can be viewed playing the 57 bells on a wide screen TV in the garden.

The gardens are well kept and there are many benches to sit and just enjoy the trees and flowers and the quietness of it all. It is truly a place to meditate. Here is the official link for The Bok Tower

Just adjacent to the garden is Pinewood Estate (a 20-room villa) built by Charles Austin Buck, a Bethlehem Steel vice president in the 1930’s was originally named “El Ritiro”. This estate is another post that I will prepare in the near future.

Here is a quote from NewsChief.com
The concert theme is “Music for a Celebration.” Music by composers including George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Duke Ellington will be performed by the Orlando Philharmonic, conducted by Andrew Lane. Vocalist Michelle Amato will sing “Summertime,” “All That Jazz” from “Chicago” and other selections.

He has been long gone (died in 1688) but some of his life is still left in Jamaica at Morgan’s Point. He was one of the most ruthless and brutal pirates of all time. He was smart and commanded so many ships that the was a force to be reckoned with in the Caribbean. He was eventually “knighted” (1674 by King Charles II) in Jamaica and thereafter was referred to as Sir Capt. Henry Morgan.

My time in Jamaica came as a result of my acceptance of an airline Captain contract to fly the country’s newly acquired Boeing 727 aircraft. I was joined by a number of other gentleman pilots from all over the world, but first a little more about the pirate Morgan.

Captain Morgan’s greatest feat occurred on January 19, 1670 when he led a fleet of 36 pirate ships against the City of Panama. At the time, the city was rumored to be the richest in the world; along with Cartagena, it was a main jumping-off point for Spanish gold on its way to Europe. Morgan sailed into port and decimated a significantly larger force led by the local governor. He burned the city to the ground and made off with 400,000 pieces of eight, later stealing much of it from his own men. Throughout his career, Morgan roamed the islands of the Bahamas, allegedly wreaking much havoc and burying plenty of treasure

Under Morgan’s watch Port Royal was lined with warehouses, goldsmiths, taverns and brothels and house rentals were said to be as high as any in London’s finest neighborhoods.

By 1690, there were between 8,000 and 10,000 permanent inhabitants at Port Royal. Some houses were three or four storys high. Everything was available including bars, taverns, restaurants, coffee houses and brothels. Capt. Morgan founded a city that lived despite his death.

In 1692, an earthquake devastated Port Royal, taking the cemetery and Morgan’s grave with it. A huge tidal wave destroyed ships in the harbor and carried one of the ships into the middle of the town. Many of the buildings were destroyed and most of the city disappeared into the sea.

Going back to where I left off about my reason for being in Jamaica. I was saying about the fellow pilots that joined me on this contract. We had a few from the famed Air America that operated as a CIA company in Vietnam. They carried out all kinds of clandestine missions for the U.S. Government. The crews were all mostly non-Jamaican. There was a Jamaica Chief Pilot and a Jamaican Flight Operation Director.

Prior to arriving in Jamaica I had been flying in the Dominican Republic with Dominicana the government airline. I had purchased a 65 foot Alden schooner in St. Thomas and had sailed it to Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic. When the Jamaica contract presented itself I sailed old Primrose IV to Jamaica and docked in the Royal Jamaica Yacht Club 10 miles from Port Royal. Now you know how I got there. Let’s continue with what Port Royal is all about.

The sunken city has bee preserved almost exactly like it was in its heyday. Fort Carlisle was constructed in 1678 on the harbour side. It was destroyed by the earthquake as well. When I was there in 1974, there was only one hotel, Morgan’s Harbour Hotel and it was at the very end of the island. The hotel at that time was is bad shape. I stayed the and the window air conditioners were so noisy that they prevented a sound sleep. The hotel actually overlooks the sunken city of Port Royal. It is rumored that the building survived the 1692 earthquake and had been a 18th century storehouse.

Fort Charles still remains much as it appeared in 1692. It did sink a few feet as a result of the earthquake. It was rebuilt but some of the old original pre-1692 stonework can still be seen.

Over 2,000 people died and more than 3,000 had serious injuries. Many of the victims were swallowed up by the earth. The town started its slow death. A fire in 1703 almost sealed the fate of Morgan Town, but a hurricane in 1722 pretty finished it off. The fort contains a small museum with artifacts brought up from the sunken city of Port Royal.

There is a possibility that there may be a underwater museum of the site of the sunken city. This is a very ambitious project but who knows it may actually happen sometime in the future.

Anyway it is interesting to walk the the streets of Port Royal, have a drink in the old grog shop, dinner at Buccaneer’s Roost with the cry of “Let’s Have Another Red Stipe”, the local Jamaican beer. Quite good actually.

I consumed many a Red Stripe at the Royal Jamaica Yacht Club bar. Being a guest member of the club I participated in some of the regatta’s that they had. After a year my contract was up and the Jamaicans had been training to take over the B727 flight operations, my and most of my colleagues services were no longer needed. I made arrangement to sail to Miami where I would search for another B727 Captain seat.

I was doing a makeover on the boat so I took a Jamaican boat right with me to Miami, found an apartment in the Miami river and docked the boat right behind the apartment. This was 1975. In those days that could be done, not anymore. 911, Homeland Security and many more restrictions on the movement of Americans in our country.

Actually I had just completed about 3 years of flying for Trans Caribbean Airways in New York and my routes were to Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. In my off days I had the capability of traveling free aboard almost any air carrier because I was a working pilot. They called us jump seat riders as our seat was in the cockpit. I was always going somewhere in my time off as in those days I was a single man. This was before Home Land Security and all the restrictions. I am grateful to have been able to live through those wonderful days. America did not control its citizens like is does in these times. Those days of free choice will probably never return.

I have always been looking for opportunity where ever I am and I thought I saw some opportunity in the islands from St. Maarten, N.L. all the way to St. Vincent. The major hotels and resorts were in need of fresh produce to feed their guests and there was no reliable supply as the islands themselves could not produce enough to fill the requirement. To make the story a bit shorter, I arranged for trailer loads of produce to be shipped by sea to Puerto Rico, then loaded aboard charter cargo aircraft and flown to the islands. The stops were St. Maarten, the French side, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Martinique, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Since the aircraft was returning empty to Puerto Rico, I got the bright idea to stop at Dominica and pick up local fruit and vegetables that would be in demand in Puerto Rico. That is how I got acquainted with Dominica.

I met a local plantation owner near the airport on the northeast side of the island. He arranged a load of plantain, mango, banana, avocado, yucca, and dasheen (a local root vegetable) - 4 tons worth! Roseau the capital city of Dominica was located on the south west side of the island and the drive from the airport was about 2+ hours over barely a 2-lane road. In fact at time the car had to stop way off the side of the road to let a bus buy. The first time was a hair raising ride, but you got used to it.

Dominica is the only place left in the Caribbean where some of the descendants of the original Carib Indians make their home. I came to know the island well, but it has so very few beaches that I would not care to permanently live there.

That business lasted a couple of years. The end came when I decided to bring lobster from St. Lucia to Puerto Rico. I did not know that I was stepping on someone’s foot, a local, that had been exporting lobster for many years. I carried a lot of lobster 2-3,000 lbs. which did not leave much for him. The next trip I made with my product for the local hotels as met by the local agriculture dept. They fraudently condemned all the fruit and vegetables on the aircraft. I unknowingly upset someone and he took his vengeance out on me. That ended my trips to St. Lucia, the hotels would have to resort to local supply again. Poor hotel residents.

Well I think I have said enough of how I found Dominica; let me tell you a little about the island and why I fell in love with it. Some say that they can trace the first humans on the island back to 3000BC. Some say the Igneri tribe (stone age) first populated the island. Then believe it or not that a year after Columbus discovered America, he visited Dominica in 1493, so Dominica and America are sister countries, you might say, LOL. The British took over the island in the early 1600’s, but France by virtue of a treaty took over the island around 1750, 15 years later the British took it back. Then the French took it back around 1775, but the British were able to gain control again about 5-8 years later. So as a result the population of the island speak several languages: the King’s English, French, local patois, and many Indian dialects.

Governments, ownership or maybe a better word “control” went back and forth until the late 1960’s when Dominica gained its full independence from the United Kingdom, but made a deal to continue to have military protection. Dominica got it’s first Premier, Constitution and Legislature, now at last Dominica became an independent country. I discovered Dominica shortly after this independence in 1971.

The landscapes of Dominica are out of this world. As I mentioned above, it is a volcanic island and has volcanic mudpots, you can boil your eggs in natural hot water steam and how about a natural hot tub. In fact the island is so unique that 2 Pirates of the Caribbean movies and also Mark Burnett’s “Pirate Master!” were filmed there.

Really, Dominica is the place to go if you would rather hike than site in a disco. The time is takes to drive from one place to another is not a short one because of the narrow roads and the mountains. Pick a spot or two and explore instead of bouncing around. Dominica forest covered mountains are green, green and more green. The grandeur and majesty is not like anything else in the world. Some of the things to do, and I have done a few, are “off the beaten trail” jeep tours. These are great as there is a guide that was born there. Do some planning to see some the breath taking waterfalls, lagoons, ocean caves, secluded very small beaches. Go tubing on some of the mountain rivers.

I am definitely going back soon for a stay of about 14 days. I will probably move 4 times with 2-3 days in each area. You have to allow one day just for the trip from one area to another.
See ya in a few days for my next adventure.

The east part of the island had been the location of Club Med Punta Cana. Along a turquoise lagoon, Punta Cana snuggles between 400 metres of beach and a magnificent coconut grove. The Club Med Spa has a thatched roof to complete the feeling of total relaxation. It was and still is a fantastic place. Once upon a time over 30 years ago it was the only resort in the area, today there are hundreds. In fact the area has its own airport now.

Instead we wanted to explore the “off the beaten” track beaches and villages. We found such a location at Bayahibe.

These beaches are reason enough to spend time in this part of the country. Denying yourself a trip to this piece of paradise would be a mistake. Fortunately, there is still easily accessible public beach space available at both. Playa Bayahibe (right in the town of Bayahibe), with its white sand, has restaurants and food stands overlooking the beach, so you don’t have to go far.

This is a small fishing village so the resorts have not taken over and there no hotels right on the beach. We were in the exploring mood, not laying on the beach all day, so we found a nice, air conditioned (rare in this village) owned by a German couple that had settled there many years ago and built a 15-unit facility for income to support themselves.

We rented a car at the main airport serving Santo Domingo, the capital city, and drove about 3 hours east, arriving about 3pm. That particular day it was rainy, so we settled in a cozy beachfront bar and had a couple of beers, before looking over the town on foot. We found out place to stay for a few days and went out to find a nice restaurant.

It only took about 15 minutes of walking until we found a great, open air, thatched roof restaurant on pilings (actually stilts about eight feed above ground) that gave a great view of the beach and Caribbean. Owned by two sisters we totally enjoyed the great food and wine they prepared for us. What a great finish to another day in paradise.

The next morning we were afoot again looking for breakfast. That was found on the beach in a very small bar with rustic tables on a veranda overlooking the water. My wife speaks spanish fluently so we quickly got acquainted with the manager Rosie. We has some traditional Dominican breakfast called Gallo Pinto. Beans and rice topped with two fried eggs. Really quite tasty. Later we found out that Rosie actually leased the location from an American living in La Romana.

It kinda made me look back and remember the time I was living in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands on a 65′ Alden Schooner that I had purchased to fix up and sail the Caribbean. That still is another story. Reason I mention St. Thomas is because while in the yacht club there I met a fellow arriving from Boston in his sailboat intending to do charters among the islands. He asked if I wanted to cook for him when he booked charters. I said yes. I was just bumming out on the boat at that time. One of the ports of call was Jost Van Dyke, a small island of the British Virgin Island group. There was this couple, she was white, he was a black islander, that had a barefoot bar on the beach.

We would drop anchor off the beach and we would take our 4-person charter group ashore to spend the evening in this bar, eating drinking and dancing. The young lady, companion of the bar owner would swing in a hammock all evening. We named her “Queenie”. After that I always thought it would be fun to have a bar like that on the beach and name it Gringo Loco as I am sometimes called.

Back to Bayahibe. We spent the next several days exploring up to an hour from Bayahibe and marvelled how much the area had grown. We took a trip across a small bay to spend the day on Saona Island and I treated my wife to her first jet ski ride. She loved it.

We hated to leave and vowed to return soon.

A great cooking blog to check out