Not far mind you, just a few miles along to the commercial port where we will spend our last weekend.
The past few days have been crazy as we have tried to avoid moving from this location, where everyone in Kingston knows us, to another berth buried in the port where we have never been open to the public before.
We knew the ship was coming last week but kept praying it would be delayed long enough for us to finish the port here. But we also made plans to move and last week I was involved in a meeting with the captain and the port authorities to try and sort out all the details.
We thought we had everything sorted and then on Friday afternoon we heard from the port that they had changed many of the terms we had agreed.
Typically, we could do nothing over the weekend but then Monday is supposed to be a day off for many of us. So once again I found my day off being disrupted by work. I have to be honest that I was not happy about having to spend all Monday morning and part of the afternoon on the phone, email and meetings, trying to decide exactly what we were going to do about the move.
Eventually I could do no more so about 2.30 we got off the ship and took the kids to Port Royal.
I heard about Port Royal in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and it once had the reputation of being the "wickedest city in the world" Much of the city was destroyed by an earthquake in 1692 which caused 2/3 of the island to disappear into the sea.
A further earthquake in 1907 caused much further damage to the British Naval Garrison stationed there - this used to be an armoury.
Despite all it's violent history, Port Royal now is not a particularly exciting place to visit so I wouldn't go out of your way to travel here to see it.
Yesterday we made the decision that we definitely had to move berth, and we were expecting that to be on Thursday night as that was the time the coal ship was due. A number of us spent much of the day racing around trying to sort out the communication and publicity for the move. I also found myself going to another meeting along with the captain to try and address all the issues that had changed from last weeks meeting.
Thankfully it was a successful meeting and we came to a good agreement.
Then this morning we discovered that the coal ship was actually going to arrive on Thursday morning and we had to move a day earlier. Further chaos and rushing around trying to do in 1 day what we had planned to do in 2.
So at 1am we leave this berth behind and we just need to see what the coming days will bring in the other berth. Yesterday we welcomed our 100,000th visitor onboard for this port so it has been very busy.
We are all looking forward to sailing to Bahamas next week!
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