On January 20, I set sail from Fort Lauderdale on what is undoubtedly the biggest single adventure in my twelve years of cruise lecturing. I am traveling all the way around South America and will arrive back in Fort Lauderdale on April 1, for a total of 72 days aboard, during which I will give 28 different talks—like a semester at sea for retirees!
My assignment is as a destination speaker, which means I am responsible for informing guests about all the places we will visit, but what excites me more is the opportunity to go beyond that and pull in other things I have learned from my decades as a professor of humanities, and wherever else my lifelong curiosity has taken me. It is so fun for me to have a built-in and eager audience for things I love to talk about.
I am a natural early riser—for me 9 to 5 is more like a sleep schedule than a work day. One of my favourite things to do on the ship is get up before dawn and head for the lounge on the bow of the ship, get coffee from the machine and watch the sky lighten and another day begin. My perch is what you see in the photo above. As the ship glides through the darkness, I feel most akin with the people below me on the bridge, who have guided us through the night and whose expertise keeps us safe and on course.
I poke around on my iPad, looking into what my friends are up to, dabbling carefully and cautiously into the news, playing a few word games, and seeing what else there is to know about the world. Around 6:30 or so, a few other people start coming through, most just to get coffee and stagger back to their suites, but a few to settle in as I have.
The spell is broken with the first human voices—mostly people doing business on the other side of the world. The ship is not solely mine anymore, and I start to think about my day. Today at 10 I will speak about Alexander von Humboldt and his time in South America, one of my all time favourite talks. After that I will change into shorts and flip flops and check out what’s going on around the ship, followed by lunch outside. Then, who knows?
When I come back, the suite attendant will have made up the bed, and honestly, forget the food, forget the ports! Seeing those brilliant white million-thread-count sheets, so crisp and tight on the bed, is one of the biggest thrills in cruising for me. It tells me I am being taken care of in the loveliest of ways, and I am free to relax and enjoy my time as I wish.
Is this my life? I shake my head every day in wonder. True, I work very, very hard to be ready (five months of work for this assignment), and onboard, I put a lot of effort into being worthy of the privilege, but if it were possible to melt into a puddle of gratitude, I would have done it long ago.