London

Less than 24 hours to go before we take the BA flight from Heathrow to Buenos Aires.

I have just checked in online and printed out our boarding passes. It looks like my hopes of an upgrade are unlikely to be fulfilled, but you never know; when we get to the check-in desk at Terminal 5, I might be able to 'charm' the person behind the desk and get an upgrade. I live in hope! All that remains for me to do is try to make sure that I have crossed all the 'T's and dotted all the 'I's of the myriad things that need to be dealt with before we leave.

We have one final appointment to keep - the very sad event at 11am of the funeral of our good neighbour, Len Logan. It hasn't come at the most convenient time for us, but we are both pleased we will be able to say our goodbyes to a dear friend.

Silver Explorer

Checking back through my photos of our previous cruises on the Silver Explorer, here is one of the boat at anchor off Costa Rica in 2011. On the left you can see one of the Zodiacs used to ferry passengers to and from the boat.

London

Just ten days to go before we leave on our exciting adventure across the South Atlantic from Ushuaia to Cape Town.

Everything has been booked: the car to Heathrow, the BA flights, the hotel in Buenos Aires and, of course, the cruise with Silversea. This is our fourth cruise on the Prince Albert/Silver Explorer.

One last thing to arrange is the authentication of my, or should I say Bob's, satellite phone. On Wednesday I will be able to use the phone for the first time and then will check that I can send and receive messages using the Iridium text messaging service. This is limited to 160 characters which should be enough to enable us to keep in touch without having to make phone calls.