Very nice. Walked from one end of Funchal to the other and then back again. Hot, sunny day. (Apols to anyone from Kensal Rise reading this! I hope your houses still have roofs.) Fancy that,  a tornado in London. I thought it was too sheltered by the Chilterns and the Thames Valley, so it just goes to show. See? I may be thousands of miles away, in the middle of the, um, Atlantic (?) Ocean, but i still know what’s going on in the world. And stuff.  We have CNN… sometimes…

Afternoon tea at Reids. Mum reckons that she has now taken tea at all of the world’s top hotels outside London. I keep meaning to google and find out whether we’ve missed any. We’ve done:

Reid’s, Madeira
Peninsular, Hong Kong
Raffles, Singapore
Algonquin, New York
Sandy Lane, Barbados

I’ve done the Ritz in London and she and dad have also done the Cipriani in Venice and the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Bombay. I wonder which ones are still left to do. We think that Claridges counts, and maybe the Lanesborough, both in London, but we’re not sure.

Afternoon tea at Reids was everything it should be, but for one blip. Avocado sandwiches. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE avocado, but avocado SANDWICHES?!?!?!?!?! :-0 Tres odd. Nice, but odd. The rest was flawless. Yummy and delicious, with good quality tea made from proper leaves, not the sawdust they put in teabags or sold as “loose tea” in the UK. Proper leaves. That looked like they had just come off a tree and been roughly chopped by Jamie Oliver. THAT’s what tea leaves are supposed to look like!

While I’m typing this, I’m trying to google for that list of hotels. Just found a site called thisisthelife dot com. well, you’ve got to look, haven’t you?!

I’ve found a list but it is still loading. I hope it doesn’t suggest any Hyatts. The Hyatt in Kota Kinabalu serves The Worst Pizza On Earth and the one in New York lost my parents’ reservation, despite the fact that they rang TWICE to check everything was in order and they were arrived on the Queen Mary II. We are not fans of Hyatt! I’m not suggesting that they are no good, they may be wonderful for other people. We’ve just been unlucky. Twice.

Anyway, let’s see what the list says… Hang on, i’ve found another site called artisansofleisure. Another one begging to be clicked on! Hold on… Yes, that one has a long list of the top 100. Definitely a Wish List to work from!

It is extraordinary how many hotels there are in the world called Peninsula. *sigh* I think i may have to remove it from my search and start again.

I’ve found a page which might be useful but it is taking FOREVER to load. People at seasonsinstyle dot com, please tidy up your front page. there is really no excuse for over 53 items, really there isn’t. not all of us are on free-to-use-as-much-as-we-want broadband, some of us are paying actual money to look at your eggtimers.

This is proving harder than i thought. Funnily enough, there are a lot of sites that have the words “greatest” and “hotel” in them… odd, that… it’s really getting quite boring trying to plough through them. May well give up on the whole concept.

Anyway, we are now chugging away from Madeira and heading towards Cap Verde, cos we’re missing out Tenerife. The rough weather not only slowed us down considerably, it also caused a number of injuries. Several people were stretchered off at Madeira and I’m guessing we left them there.

Oh, the George V in Paris. That should probably be on there. I’ll have to ask the parents if they have taken tea there. I don’t think I ever have.

Oh, I give up. Maybe another time. When I win the lottery or something.