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If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Next Month

I’m not sure I ever saw the movie “If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium,” but the idea is pretty clear from the title. I have a different take on it, though, as I struggle to keep straight everything I have lined up for the next few months. I am in London, using my time between cruises to finish some talks for Baltic ports in June and July. Next week, I head off for Barcelona, then Rome, then Barcelona again, then Marseille, then…..and so on.

Mind you, I am observing, not complaining (I am eternally grateful for my good travel fortune). Still, it is disorienting to have spent the morning studying up on one foreign city only to go outside and find myself in another. Yesterday, when I was meeting with the Seabourn lecturer coordinator, I felt at moments like the proverbial deer in the headlights as I struggled to remember what cruises I was booked on, and when and where.

It doesn’t help that I am juggling two cruise lines this year, and though I am not being secretive about it, it’s kind of bad form to start chatting accidentally about the wrong cruise line. Oops— not going to Copenhagen with you in June. Sorry!

It’s a nice problem to have, but it is frying some brain cells, for sure, here in Stockholm-on-Thames tonight.