They have changed the order of loading…this came as a surprise after everyone had made plane, hotel, etc reservations and now half of us have to change everything!  This has been handled very poorly by the loadmaster who never bothered to contact anyone and is staying miles away at a very expensive resort…paid for by us in our hefty fees no doubt.  Instead of being loaded 6 pm on Sunday or (we thought maybe Monday if it didn’t go like clockwork) now we are being loaded Tuesday morning at 9 am.  We were supposed to be flying out Tuesday morning.  So today we have to change our flight ( we think at no cost) and yesterday we contacted the hotel in Istanbul where we’d made a reservation and pick-up arrangements and that was no problem.  They just switched the date to Wednesday though we  told them we weren’t sure if we’d get there Wednesday or Thursday.  We are being loaded Tuesday morning but don’t trust any of this so we’ll make flight reservations for Thursday.  There are 16 boats being transported.  4 are being loaded Sunday, 8 Monday and 4 Tuesday.  But who knows if they’ll get everyone loaded Monday and that would push us back later.  We also have to go 6 miles away to get loaded so the transport company doesn’t have to pay some huge dockage fee to get us closer to where we are.  Cruisers are furious even if they haven’t had plans to change just because it has been handled so poorly.  But we have no second choice so.  Later this morning we’ll go back to the airlines to rebook.  We haven’t actually paid yet, we had to wait until Sunday, the beginning of their work week,  so that makes things easier. 

  And the Red Sox aren’t doing well!  But I predict that by this time next week everything will be fine.  We’ll be in Istanbul, DoraMac will be loaded and on her way to Turkey and the Red Sox will be winning. 

I have a favor.  My Outlook email seems to download really slowly on the Netbook.  So could you not just hit reply if you respond to an email from me.  I know it’s a pain to have to start a new email but it would really help.  The other thing you can do is "reply" but then highlight everything I wrote and hit the back button and it will erase it all.  Then you can type your message and that’s all that will be sent.  Make sense? 

Guess that’s about it except that we’re listening to an Indian warship trying to contact the Male’ Port Control and no one is responding.  That happened to us but, who are we?  This is an Indian warship!  Another vessel responded to the Indian warship and told him to contact "his agent" at 7:30 on a different channel.  (That’s what we had to do.)  Guess the Indian military didn’t like that answer because they’re still trying to call Male’ port control.

Ru

DoraMac

ps We can actually see the transport ship from here and there is a giant yacht already loaded seeming to fill the entire deck!  But apparently it will move for the loading process. Who knows!