Month: December 2017

Since I made the decision to put together a year of more or less continuous cruising, I have been grappling with the workload I have gotten myself in for. I knew I was going to have to plan carefully and be very disciplined to Be ready, and so far I am finishing up 2017 beautifully on track. I am now up to eighty lectures in the six years I have had cruise assignments to prepare for. Hardly seems possible—I must really love doing the work (answer:yes, I do).

My goal ( actually my need) was to be ready for all of 2018 by the end of 2017, so in the last two months I have been working on lectures I won’t actually give until next fall. Today I put to bed the last one. It can slumber peacefully until I am ready to take another look, at which point I will see the weaknesses better than I can now, and will clarify, liven up and otherwise improve good lectures into what I hope will be excellent ones.

Like so many things, what one sees from the outside (Cruising! World Travel!) is the reward for what is not seen— the equivalent of the years of hard work that only shows to the public in the museum, or on the field of play. So  yes, my cruising life is a lot of fun, but also an astronomical amount of unseen “fun work.”

Now I will get a jump start on 2019 before  January 6, when I get one of my payoffs— the first leg of the Silversea World Cruise (Los Angeles to Hawaii to Tahiti).  Aloha!

 

 

I have always described myself as a percher. I am happy alighting on a branch and enjoying it for a while, then moving on. I remember as a child how these lines from Victor Hugo lodged in my soul:

Be like a bird, who, halting in its flight,

On limb so slight,

Feels it give way beneath him,

Yet sings,

Knowing he hath wings.

Sometimes my perch is not anything external, but a peace I have had to struggle mightily to find deep inside , and sometimes life  provides a landing pad  with runway lights and a restaurant that’s  open.

This ability to be okay anywhere has led me to take some big leaps in my life and I have come to another. In 2017, I was away cruising so often that I found myself feeling that, much as I love the little nest I have made in San Diego, it was empty a crazy amount  of the time.

I figured I could do one of two things. I could cruise less, or I could cruise enough more that I wouldn’t need more than temporary places to perch between stays onboard.

Guess what I chose?

Now that a sufficient number of my Silversea and Seabourn cruise assignments have been secured, I can announce that as of the middle of March 2018, I am renting out my condo for a year ( panoramic view of San Diego, one block from Balboa Park—interested?) and hopping from ship to ship with a little bit of time here and there in between to explore beyond port destinations.  These gigs through 2018 are on the calendar here, and the 2019 ones will be up shortly.

So now, I move to the edge of the branch, look around, and prepare to jump  I hope you’ll follow my posts on this big adventure