I started up the migration again preperation again after some much needed time off.
The UNESCO folks have everything they need, so we are free to proceed with the migration
Things seem to go along quite more smooth. The last time I had attepmted this was when Drupal 8 was on version 8.1. Now we are on 8.4
I just attempted a straight migration using the following syntax in my command
drush migrate-upgrade --legacy-db-url=mysql://drupaluser:@127.0.0.1:33067/DATABASE_NAME --legacy-root=http:/site-namel.dd:8083