We will be driving a rental car down to Port St. Lucie. Florida on Saturday, April 1, 2017. We will initially get a ride to the airport in Columbia to pick up our rental car for the drive down to Ft. Lauderdale since we will be flying home from Berlin, Germany at the end of this trip. We will coordinate the rental car pick up time in Columbia so that we will be able to drop it off in Ft. Lauderdale within the 24 hour period of a one day rental. Our initial plan is to be on the road by 11:00 AM on Saturday so that we can drop the car off in Ft. Lauderdale by 11:00 AM on Sunday.
We will be staying in our usual overnight location in Florida, Port St. Lucie. It is about 7.5 hours from Columbia, and then only about 1.5 hours more driving time from there to Ft. Lauderdale. There are nice restaurants and shops nearby the hotel, so we have plenty of choices for dinner on Saturday night, and can pick up anything from the nearby stores in case we realize we forgot to pack something.
We will be going to Mass on Sunday morning at 7:30 AM in Port St. Lucie at the St. Bernadette Catholic Church, which is only about 1.3 miles from our hotel. If possible, we will leave directly from the church since we will be running a little short of time to make the 11:00 AM car rental drop off time at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport. There is another Catholic church nearby, St. Lucie Catholic Church, which is only 3.8 miles from the hotel and has an earlier Mass at 6:15 AM, but that is really early, but may make the timing better for getting to Ft. Lauderdale and return the rental car.
We will visit some of the same ports on this cruise as we did on our April 2016 Transatlantic Cruise, Ponta Delgada, Azores; Zeebrugge, Belgium; and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, but are planning on doing some different things than we have in the past. We will cover the detailed plans in the next Trip Planning Updates. We will be visiting two new ports, one we have never been to, Hamburg, and the other, Le Havre, that we have only been to as disembarkation port for a train ride into Paris on a British Isles Transatlantic Cruise in 2009.
Stay tuned for additional information.
| Date | Day | Port of Call or Destination | Arrival Time | Departure Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4/02/17 | Saturday | Drive to Port St. Lucie, FL | ||
| 4/02/17 | Sunday | Drive to Ft. Lauderdale - Embarkation | 6:30 PM | |
| 4/03/17 | Monday | At Sea | ||
| 4/04/17 | Tuesday | At Sea | ||
| 4/05/17 | Wednesday | At Sea | ||
| 4/06/17 | Thursday | At Sea | ||
| 4/07/17 | Friday | At Sea | ||
| 4/08/17 | Saturday | At Sea | ||
| 4/09/17 | Sunday | Ponta Delgada, Azores | 8:00 AM | 5:00 PM |
| 4/10/17 | Monday | At Sea | ||
| 4/11/17 | Tuesday | At Sea | ||
| 4/12/17 | Wednesday | At Sea | ||
| 4/13/17 | Thursday | Le Havre, France | 7:00 AM | 8:00 PM |
| 4/14/17 | Friday | Zeebrugge, Belgium | 9:00 AM | 8:00 PM |
| 4/15/17 | Saturday | Rotterdam, Netherlands | 7:00 AM | 10:00 PM |
| 4/16/17 | Sunday | At Sea | ||
| 4/17/17 | Monday | Disembark Hamburg, Train to Berlin | 5:00 AM | |
| 4/18/17 | Tuesday | Berlin, Germany | ||
| 4/19/17 | Wednesday | Berlin, Germany | ||
| 4/20/17 | Thursday | Berlin, Germany | ||
| 4/21/17 | Friday | Flight Home From Berlin | 9:05 AM | 9:00 PM |