This cruise has marked a first for me. I have to admit that, despite having a lot of fun with the guests and crew, I am eager to get off the ship in Singapore in a few days. There are a couple of reasons for this, the most compelling of which is that the meltdown of my hard drive has affected my comfort zone.
I am glad to have a good backup plan—and I am so relieved I do—but I don’t like having to rely on it. There’s a drone of worry that my slides won’t pull up from my flash drive onto the laptop in the show lounge, and even when they do, the formatting and some of the builds vanished in the exporting from Mac to PC, and things aren’t exactly the way I want them. So far so good, with two lectures to go, but it hasn’t been good for the peace of mind I usually have in abundance.
The second is that, as far as I can recall, this is the first back-to-back cruise I have done with the identical itinerary in reverse. Some of the ports are good for one day but a bit thin for two (and in a few cases, three), so my eagerness to go ashore has been depleted, especially when the weather is as hot and humid as it has been. I am usually fine with “been there, done that,” kinds of ports because at the very least, it’s a different day, different people, different possibilities for serendipity. Still, I am a bit tired, and not really as up for that as I might be. Better get used to repetition because this summer i will be going around and around in the Baltic for two months!
Third, this has been a long assignment for me. I left home in early December, beginning in Bali, and not ending until Athens in May—five months total, and I am now into the fourth month. I have been on and off ships, but mostly on. It’s so long without a break, because Australia and Asia are so far away that going home and coming back was too gruesome to consider when I set up my schedule. Getting my life essentially for free while onboard was a huge part of the equation in pulling together My Year of Living Travelly, and paying the bills for land expenses can get pretty steep for a community college pensioner, so I set it up to have as much of the former and as little of the latter as possible— at most about nine or ten days on land at a time.
Still, this is the life for me. I look forward to getting my laptop problem fixed, and expect that will put some bounce in my step. And then—Bucket List!—I am off to the Maldives, a cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean, on an itinerary that will work its way back to Singapore, with most stops, including Sri Lanka, in places I have never been, or am eager to see again. I can’t wait! But first a little recovery time, for my laptop, and me.