OK, just wanted to give everybody an update on what is going on. On Friday, we finally decided that it just wasn't going to be practical for us to do the full CROSS, so we have decided that we will just stick with doing the TA part.

So now that the final decision has been made, we finally got all our flights booked on AA using airmiles. We are flying non-stop from DFW to Paris where we will spend a couple of days before flying to Funchal to catch the ship. We also managed to get a non-stop flight on the 19th back from FLL using our miles, but had to settle for the 5:37pm flight. Of course there is plenty of time to keep checking to see if a better flight time opens up.

Now, I can get the hotels booked as well. Anybody have a recommendation for a hotel in Funchal?