Diary

 

The day after tomorrow I leave for Toronto to visit friends I met on a cruise a few years back, then it’s on to Montreal to meet up with a college friend and head out on the first of three fall foliage cruises on the St. Lawrence River to Newfoundland,  the Maritimes and New England.

Time to check in with myself  again.

This stay in San Diego was puzzling. I was in the city I have called home for more than half a century, staying with Dan  around the corner from my condo in the  same building, in a neighborhood I know intimately, doing things that are part of my routine, but there’s a disconnect.  It’s like I am visiting here, more than returning home.   Dan and I have had a lot of fun doing different things and just being together, so disconnect doesn’t mean discontent.  I have been happy in the present here, and that is what I most want to feel.

Maybe it’s my concept  of home that is changing.  Home, it appears, is wherever I am.  “Home,” as a t-shirt I bought somewhere says,” is where the anchor drops.” In San Diego during My Year of Living Travelly, nothing I own is in a drawer.  Clothes I don’t need stay in my suitcases, and what I might use is in a box in the bedroom.  The rest is in my storage locker in the basement. There is really almost no difference between the way I live in San Diego these days, and the way I live on ships, or between cruises in places I visit. It’s all suitcases and storage. I am totally  comfortable with that, and miss only fleetingly anything that is part of my more settled life.

But here is what is most different this time: I didn’t play tennis or golf even once.  I didn’t go to minyan at the synagogue. When Dan and I walked in the park, I didn’t pick up trash on the path, as I always have.  Those things are all part of my San Diego identity. It’s not as if I made a conscious choice not to do familiar things, it simply did not occur to me  until maybe two days ago, that I wasn’t doing them.

Am I just a visitor here now, in the place  I have called home since I was fourteen? Time will tell.  I will be back for two more short stays before I leave for five months in Asia.  I am not making even the slightest effort to project how my outlook will alter over time. Maybe I will come back  gladder than ever to have this wonderful city to live in. Maybe I will come back a hopeless vagabond. Maybe ( and the November elections will play a role in this) I may decide I don’t want to live here anymore.  I guess I will just have to wait and see.

 

 

 

I may have talked about this before, but I am feeling too much in the moment to go back to check. One of the things I love about this cruising life is the opportunity it offers me to more fully inhabit the present.

This might sound weird from someone who spent time on this assignment in Alaska working on talks for Hong Kong and Singapore that I won’t give until next February, but the truth is that although I have to force myself to stay on track to be ready for what’s ahead, my head simply wants to be here now.

Today I went on a Zodiac in Alert Bay, British Columbia. The sky was bright, the water was sparkling, the seals and a Minke whale were doing their thing patrolling the bay. A dozen or more bald eagles watched the show, which of course includes us in our bright orange life jackets. As we moved slowly at the edge of a kelp bed looking for otters (no luck), I had one of those moments in which I said to myself “there is no place on earth I would rather be than right here right now.”

It is a joyous feeling to be just right exactly where you are. I came back to the ship ready to appreciate that the hot chocolate waiting for us was the only perfect thing for the moment, and that everything else was exactly right as it was.

i often get reflective on the last day of a cruise (I fly to San Diego tomorrow from Vancouver), and today was no exception.  Looking back, I have a number of regrets about what I didn’t do or see.  Those all pull me out of the present  I am pulled out of the present by looking forward too, and  since I feel as if I haven’t taken advantage of this  opportunity nearly enough, I plan to request to come back here in 2020, if the fates decree.

Staying in the present is rewarding, but so is looking back and saying, “wow!”  And so is looking forward and realizing how quickly (less than two weeks) until my adventure continues. Today I saw the first signs of fall in the turning leaves on the banks of the islands in Alert Bay.  Soon it is on to Montreal for me, where the nip in the air and the blazing beauty of the passing of one season and the arrival of another reminds me so acutely that the present isn’t just now, but contains all that has happened and all that is to come. Goodbye, British Columbia!  Thanks for the sunset ( below). Glad to have been present for it

 

 

 

 

A number of years ago, I took several trips in connection with research for my novels that took me to places where it was cold and rainy. I remember making a vow that the next trip I took would involve a bathing suit and a Zodiac.

All this time I had assumed that when the time came, the Zodiac and the bathing suit would go together. I envisioned coming ashore on the sand of a South Seas island, or the rocky Galapagos coast , or something exotic like that.

Instead I took a number of trips where Zodiacs were as unlikely to be seen as a Metro would be here in coastal Alaska.  As for the bathing suit part,  I have had many opportunities to go to places where bathing suits were the preferred attire, from the pool deck of a ship to Mediterranean and Caribbean beaches.  The thing is, I have decided I honestly don’t like swimming—or even getting wet— all that much, and one of the nice things about getting older is that I don’t care whether I should feel differently.  I don’t, and I don’t have to.  I have gone, since I made my vow, to plenty of places warm enough for other people to be out tanning or splashing around in their swimwear, and that’s good enough for me.

However, in all my travels, I have never set foot on a Zodiac.  Until today, that is, in Misty Fjords, Rudyerd Bay, Alaska.  Misty Fjords is appropriately named, as the photo below shows. The water is glassy and the glacier-carved cliffs tower over insignificant beings like us.  We motored along, stopping to admire waterfalls and bald eagles, before heading back to mulled wine and dry clothing.

So now, at least a decade later, I can say I did it  I have taken a trip involving a bathing suit and a Zodiac, just not the same trip.  Since I didn’t even pack a swimsuit this time, I can’t jump in the Jacuzzi in a feeble attempt to make that claim.  Oh well—two trips (or in my case many) are better than one.  But I still am holding out for the arrival on that sandy beach some day.  I might even put on a swimsuit and get wet for that!

 

Well, the  long stretch of perfect health In  My Year of Living Travelly came to a screeching halt after five months.

I gave a lecture two days ago despite a sore and scratchy throat and  figured I would shake it off, as I usually do. This cold virus had other plans for me.

Since then, I had to beg out of hosting a dinner table and being a panelist on Liars Club, which I love doing. I missed out on a  zodiac adventure yesterday and a shore excursion I really wanted to do today, and have  been holed up listlessly in my room, venturing out only for a cup of tea or something to nibble on with no enthusiasm.

Those of you who have known me from my leaching days are probably aware that a few years back I developed chronic inflammation and swelling of the supporting structure for my vocal cords, which causes  them not to line up the way they should  to produce a strong voice.  It was a severe enough problem that I had to give up my full-time teaching jobs several years before I planned to, since I simply cannot project my voice well, or for very long.

Cruise lecturing is fine because I have a headset mike planted right next to my mouth and I don’t have to speak for more than 45 minutes a couple of times a week.  The hardest part for me has always been dinner at large tables, since  projecting my voice enough to converse feels similar to the strain of yelling with a healthy voice.   I often go back to my room quite hoarse after dinner, but I have generally recovered by morning.

But not when a cold makes things worse.  If I talk at all in the early stages, I set myself up for the almost  dead certainty of a couple of days  with total laryngitis.  I’m hiding out now not just because I feel like crap, but because I don’t want to have to use my voice at all for the chit chat that is part of life on a ship.

So far so good.  I sound like a frog, but I am not down to a squeak. This self-imposed quarantine has also been good for the other passengers as well, since ships have often been called floating petri dishes, and hopefully I won’t spread this around.

This cold came on so soon after the start of the second cruise that I have met almost no one.  No dinners, no shore excursions, no team trivia after the first two days.  This is a weird one so far,  but since the cruise is a full two weeks, I will still have some time to be my usual self and have fun with the folks on board.

The good news is that I don’t have a lecture for two more days, nor another table to host for three. The bad news is that I am missing Alaska!  Lucky for me I saw a lot on the leg from Vancouver to Seward, and  the new ports are at the end in British Columbia, when presumably I will be my old self again.

One of my unanswered questions about My Year of  Living Travelly was if getting sick would put a damper on my enthusiasm and make me wish I could go home. I now have my answer, at least for something as minor as a cold: If you have to crawl into a cave for a few days, why not do it in  a bed with fantastic linens and fluffy pillows, a cabin steward, and room service? Sure, being sick is no fun, but my life is as good as ever.

 

Wow! I just realized I didn’t post once during the first Alaska cruise.  Maybe that’s a good sign that I really switched gears, but it’s more honestly the result of a busy schedule and poor satellite internet.

i am in Seward, Alaska, between my first and second cruises.  This evening we head back in the direction of Vancouver, from where I will fly back to San Diego briefly before heading off to Montreal for the fall season—can the first falling leaves be on the horizon so soon?

So now it’s transition time. Dan left for the airport a few minutes ago, and after a goodbye at his bus, I went back on board a ship that most guests rarely see.  The cabin stewards look as if they are in the starting blocks for a sprint, which in a way they are. In a few hours the ship will be pristine again and ready for the new passengers.  But right now, the hallways are filled with piles of sheets and towels, and staff are coming through to remove copious quantities of half-empty liquor and wine bottles. A real bonanza if I drank the hard stuff—I’d never come out of my room!  I did go through a massive pile of soda cans and discovered diet tonic water, which I didn’t know they had. Score!  I guess they remove all the stuff in the fridges, even if unopened, then put it all back in later—maybe wiped down?  I will have to ask.

So now, I am doing my laundry—the one time you can be sure the machines won’t be in use—and spreading out to fill all the closets and drawers in the room.  It is so comforting and fun to have Dan aboard, and it would be great to be looking forward to having a friend join me (illness recovery prevented my buddy Sharon from coming along), but I do have to admit, there is something special about calling 100% of the shots about time, space and activities.

And of course, it is time for a mental recap and a new set of promises to myself, as follows:

1) I will skip breakfast except on tour mornings

2) I will cheat less on my rules at lunch, and will skip the buffet in favor of ordering from a menu at the pool or restaurant most days.  Easier to know how much I have eaten.

3)  I will drink more water and less wine at dinner.  I no longer have wine at lunch at all, except if I just finished a lecture

4). I will walk briskly at least an hour a day, on treadmill or in port

5). I will get over my dislike of small hotel-style gyms and give my upper body something to cheer about.

6) I will do more of my work in the beautiful public spaces on the ship, rather than holed up in my room.

7) I will not order room service just because I don’t have a concrete dinner plan.  Something always works out.

8) I will go on more strenuous shore excursions.  There were reasons to be more sedentary this time around (Dan’s broken toe and my need to get familiar with the ports), but there’s no excuse this time!

9)….And on that note, I will kayak at least once  I don’t know why I have it so built up in my mind that I will be a spaz at it and end up in the icy water, but that’s the vision I have.

I am repeating a mantra that I wish I followed a little better:  Being afraid of something is a good reason to do it.   Since this Year of Living Travelly is in large part about expanding my comfort zone, I will do my best to become the Kayak Queeen, and Solo Traveler extraordinaire!

And since ten resolutions has more resonance than nine, I will add my ongoing one:  never let even one day pass without remembering to be grateful for this beautiful life

Time to move clothes into the dryer.  Then into town for that hour of walking—and no, poking around the shopping street doesn’t count!

 

It seems as if most of the time I arrive a day too late or leave a day too early to see a city make a big splash, but in Vancouver I was just right, and I didn’t even know it until the excitement was  on my  doorstep—literally.

Many months ago, Dan and I made reservations to come to Vancouver a couple of days before starting a cruise, to give us a chance to look around a little more.  Since arriving it has been one surprise after another.  First, the hotel we booked, The Sylvia,  turns out to be a historic beauty right on the waterfront of English Bay. Second it has been sunny and warm, the water sparkling, and the locals  out in droves on bikes and on foot, enjoying the utter happiness of this beautiful place they call home. With Dan’s broken toe we haven’t been able walk very far to dinnner, and voila, the hotel restaurant turned out to be first rate.

”There are fireworks tomorrow tonight, “ our cab driver said. “You’ll be able to see them from your hotel.”  That was the first big understatement of our trip.  The fireworks were a lollapalooza, part of an International Fireworks Festival, spanning several weeks, in which countries compete for who can impress Vancouver the most with a  25-minute display choreographed to music. The festival has been going on nearly three decades, and I had to shake my head in wonderment that a city could get other countries to come and entertain it like this, for no  reward that I could discern except the bragging rights of winning.  I wonder what would happen if I tried to persuade top chefs to come compete at my place, and then I would clap one of them on the back and say, “Congratulations!  Your truffle-infused duck fat potato confit with persillade and pea sprout garnish wins the prize!  Thanks for coming!  Bye!””

It didn’t take us long to determine that another surprise was in store this weekend, when we started seeing all the costumes and an extraordinary spirit of fun and frivolity everywhere.  Not only was there a comic convention going on downtown, but it was a Pride Weekend and there would be a huge parade passing  by —you guessed it—one block from our hotel.  Drums,  rainbow floats, lots of random marchers and proud onlookers.  Thanks, Universe —I needed a reminder that even though so much seems dark and threatening now at home,  there  has been great progress in my lifetime on this and other social fronts I care about.

I  am feeling like royalty!  I mean, how many visitors get fireworks and a parade?  And then, to top it off, I discovered wines from the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia.  I had been there once with my late husband, who grew up on the shores of Lake Okenagan, and while there we tried the wine and weren’t very impressed. With my penchant for trying local when I travel, I decided to give it another chance, and yum!  I was, of course, inspired by that to give local peach wheat beer a try at lunch in Stanley Park yesterday. Yum too!    So of course I had to confirm my experiment by trying Okanagan wine again today at lunch.  Even better than the first one!  The photo below is included to show what great lengths I will go to to boost the British Columbia economy by drinking their best!  Cheers!

 

 

Life lessons  from My Year of Living Travelly come from surprising places, including the cramped and stifling quarters of my storage unit.  All the personal effects I needed to get out of my condo in preparation for a renter were stored in boxes stacked six feet high, and I had to look through them to change out the clothing I needed the last few months in the Mediterranean for  more casual and outdoorsy clothes for Alaska, and, while I was at it, the warmer wardrobe I will need for my Montreal-based fall foliage cruises that start right on the heels of my return from Alaska at the end of August.

Pulling out box after box and seeing everything from tennis tops to winter socks, skimpy camisoles to wool sweaters, and shoes galore from dress sandals to boots, I had a realization of how much I truly have not missed these things, and how I don’t want to let my life feel overburdened by belongings when I finally move back in

I adopted a mantra in the last four months, that if something I was considering buying was just going to go straight into one of the storage boxes when I got home, I wasn’t going to buy it no matter how much it called to me.  Remembering those boxes will be an even more powerful deterrent, now that I have looked from the perspective of time at how dispensable it all is.  And this is after years of successive downsizings from a big house and a vacation home to a one-bedroom condo! I would have thought I’d gotten it pretty much down to what I truly wasn’t ready to relinquish (and maybe I wasn’t at the time), but I see now I am still nowhere close.

I have decided that when it comes time to live in my own place again, I am dumping most of what I stored. Except for jewelry.  It’s my scrapbook of my travels. The happiness I will feel in getting rid of those boxes will be matched only by the pleasure of having just the right earrings and necklace to go with whatever clothes I have remaining after the purge. Basic black?  Goes with every piece of jewelry I own!

 

I don’t quite know what to call this short hiatus between my Mediterranean and Baltic adventures and my  Alaska gigs on Seabourn coming up in three weeks. To call it being “home” is a bit of a misnomer, because I am staying with my partner Dan, who has a condo in the same complex as I do, but I rented out mine and now walk by my door without being able to go inside, and I see a different car in my space.  But to title this post “What  I Like About Being Back  in San Diego” misses the nuances of how I feel in the place where I have lived more than half a century.

But whatever I call it, there are a few things worth commenting on that I have noticed with enhanced pleasure these last few days.

1.  I really enjoy hearing Spanish spoken everywhere. Sorry to anyone who thinks that is a problem. I think it is a huge cultural plus.
2. I am already very reattached to my blender.  I have really missed breakfast smoothies my way.  Recipe: frozen fruit ( or fresh with ice), almond milk and stevia.  Low calorie and fabulous!
3. I love having my phone service back.  Much simpler.
4. i am glad to be able to resume some favorite routines, like morning walks in Balboa Park with Dan.
5.  It’s good to have a big gym to go to, not the  hotel-like ones on ships. Truth told, I haven’t been yet (too busy and too jet lagged) but today’s the day. (Or maybe tomorrow…) Got to shed the  five pounds I gained  before I leave for Alaska  and get my upper body strong again. I averaged 100 miles a month walking the last few months, but that doesn’t help the tennis  serve or golf swing. Plus, five pounds is pretty good fo four months on ships, but if I don’t lose as I go along, after a few more assignments I will be changing it to My Year of Living Blimpily.
6. And  speaking of tennis, I am off this morning to play for the first time since March and have golf set up next week.
7. I love having my friends nearby and already have a full dance card for next week with lunches, coffees, sports, minyan and other groups I am part of.
8. I love spending time with Dan. It’s been less strange than I thought it might be living in his condo, since we usually spent our days independently when I lived around the corner and got together mostly in the evenings. He’s been so generous about sharing space and since I am still living out of a suitcase, I hope I am not moving in a bit too much.
9. I am finding this experiment in living without a car intriguing, at least so far. It adds an element of interest, requiring me to consider options and solve problems I never gave much thought to.
10. I love not having to think, “how much is this in dollars?”

Following David Letterman, I will stop with theTop Ten, but the bonus number eleven would have to be that life is good, wherever I am!

Well, this part of My Year of Living Travelly is over. Four months ago,  I flew to Manaus, Brazil to begin the adventure. Four months, forty-three blog posts, sixteen countries,  five travel companions, and who knows how many ports later, the European chapter comes to a close.

As I sit in the Copenhagen airport waiting for my flight back to the US, it is time for a little reflection.  Here are some random thoughts.

1) I still break out in a broad grin on a bus going just about anywhere in any port, just because being there is such a privilege and blessing. I simply can’t believe Wanderlust Girl  of  six decades ago has become Wanderwoman!

2) I still look forward to every day, and today the theme is “Oh boy—something different!” Dry land and a seriously different destination, my home state, California.

3) I have come to appreciate more and more how diversity is reshaping our world. Everywhere I see people living in a place that is clearly not of their ethnic origin, and how successfully they seem to be fitting in.  I know as a tourist I don’t see the whole picture, but what I see is encouraging. People who think Denmark ( for example) should be just for the Danes are as out of touch with reality as people who expect the Dutch  to all still be wearing wooden shoes.

4)  Living Travelly has caused me to inhabit the present much more successfully than in the past, an observation I have made on all-day tours.  I used to watch the clock—how many more hours we had yet to go. Now I just sit back and enjoy.  Maybe thinking in terms of structured time was a small bit of leftover baggage I still had to shed from my working years. Now I just have to be careful I don’t get so relaxed I literally miss the boat!

5) This will be the first time that going home has felt like a continuation of travel more than an end ( however brief) to it. Today as I prepared to leave the ship, I scrounged around to have my keys handy before realizing I didn’t need them.  I have rented out my condo and given my car for the duration of my Year of Living Travelly to my son, so I don’t need any keys. Being in San Diego will feel a bit like another stop where I live out of suitcases, but with the wonderful addition of my friends and my very tolerant partner, Dan.  It’s going to feel pretty strange, I think, this combination of being in a place I have lived more than half a century, but without the ease of being fully home.

6) My Year of Living Travelly has had at its core not just the desire to see the world, but to provide the chance to reconnect with myself.  As I approach my seventieth birthday ( end of 2019), who is this person I have become and and am still continuously becoming?  In that respect, I may learn more about myself in the three weeks I am in San Diego, because I won’t have the ability to settle into the old me without a home or a car to do it with.

Just now I had the thought, “wow, that’s really going to be interesting!” and I felt a surge of desire to get on that plane and jet home.  Circle back to points one and two in this post. Yes, Wanderwoman is both home anywhere, and happy  to be going home.