Final night

Tomorrow we disembark, a graceless word for a sad process that Holland America will have organized to a faretheewell. They have to. They need to move around 800 of us passengers off by around 10:30 amin order to start moving 1350 new passengers on board at 11:30.for a trip through the Panama Canal. (I could have extended my trip for three weeks and gotten off in Seattle, but it's really time to be going home.) About half the 600 crew members will also leave the Amsterdam tomorrow to be replaced by new folks, who must be both moved on board and integrated into ship procedures in time to set metaphorical sail tomorrow evening.

Only the Dutch could manage to make all that happen and stay essentially human, God bless them.

I said a reluctant goodbye to the ocean, watching the waves after supper until it was too dark to see them, and even then I staying on deck because I could still hear the water sloshing past the ship. We're only 121.7 nautical miles out of Ft. Lauderdale with calm seas and following winds. By dawn tomorrow we'll be docked.

Reality looms

"Remember to send me a grocery list," my daughter Lizz texts me. Grocery list? Oh, right, I will need to feed myself, starting Sunday.

"Do you want me to extend the temporary insurance coverage I have on your car for the day after you get back?" Car insurance. Oh, yeah, that.

For four months, I have been totally taken care of, and in five days, I will be my responsibility again. I am not complaining, I prefer to be the one doing that, but my instincts are rusty. What do I eat when I can't take the elevator to the Lido? What other normal adult responsibilities besides car insurance have I not thought about since early January? I know I'll need to file my taxes -- I filed for an extension, but they do need to be done relatively soon. But if Lizz hadn't reminded me about the car insurance, I wouldn't have remembered.

I think I will just trust the combination of Lizz and cold hard reality. It's six hours earlier in Portland than currently on board the Amsterdam, I'll be waking up way early and can spend the extra time remembering how to be a grownup.

Bad photo juju

As I hefted my big green suitcase onto the bed to pack it, the plug-in charger for my camera batteries fell out.

To appreciate the irony of this, we must return to the Great Wall of China, where after I had taken a few pictures, my camera announced that it needed its battery changed, and turned itself off. "Damn!", I thought, "I know I didn't pack that recharger. Now what?"

But the concierge at the Beijing Sheraton Dongcheng was up to the challenge. He dispatched a minion to a camera store, got an all-purpose camera battery recharger (and a second battery), and got a half charge into one battery -- all there was time for. I repaid the costs and set forth confident that I had my camera woes resolved.

Fast forward to the overnight to the Taj Mahal. At the hotel, I raise my camera to snap the picturesque valet and once again, "Change battery, charge low." The next day, I was to see the Taj Mahal, I had to have a camera. But I'm now a seasoned world traveler, I can just ask the concierge to get me a battery charger or even a new camera -- it is, after all, my once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Taj. But midday in Beijing is not late evening in Agra. The concierge looked at me as if I were only the latest of a long line of crazy tourists with absurd expectations, and said in the slow enunciation one uses with a fussy child, "I am sorry, Madame, but no stores are open at this  time."

Unreasonably, I felt ill-used. "The Chinese solved this problem for me," I thought, confirming the Agra concierge's unspoken evaluation of me, and went off, pouting. Eventually I realized that I had my tablet with me, and that my tablet has both front and rear facing cameras, and schlepping the tablet through the security line got me a great conversation with one of the machine-gun-carrying guides, who was curious about my "iPad", which has apparently become the international generic for tablets, so that one turned out OK too.

When I returned to the ship, one of the first things I did was to try to recharge my camera's batteries with the universal recharger. I couldn't figure out how to make it work. No instruction manual, and all labels were, of course, in Chinese. After several days of failure, I went to the photography shop on board, and they were great, going far above and beyond, but they too were unable to make it work.

Photography was forbidden in the Valley of the Kings anyway, and I am (by the grace of God) not all that photographically oriented anyway, so the Suez Canal passed undetected. But by the time we got to Greece, I had decided I wanted a camera and went out and bought a new one -- cheapest model point-and-shoot, powered by AA batteries, adequate to the task of reminding me where I had been. 49 Euros.

Now we are on the tour of Barcelona. I know I put the new camera in my bag. The guide says, "Around this next corner is one of the most magnificent views in all of Sevilla, perhaps all of Spain." And he is right, we are staring at the gloriously elaborate facade of Sevilla's cathedral in the morning sun, I reach into my bag -- and cannot find the camera. I search frantically without success. I'd like to be able to blame pickpockets, but not even the most degenerate wretch on the street would bother lifting my el cheapo.

The tour winds to its conclusion, we return to the ship, I unpack my bag, and there's the camera with an innocent look on its face.

And now the recharger for my original camera tumbles out of the suitcase. And the original camera and its batteries are already packed away in the other suitcase, which has its snaps fastened and a pink strap wrestled closed around it.

I give up. If any irresistible photo op occurs in the 1412.2 nautical miles from here to Ft. Lauderdale, I will run for my tablet and probably miss it . Taking pictures with a tablet, by the way, is a damned awkward procedure. Maybe I will just beg some passerby to shoot whatever it is and give him my email address.

Sargasso sea

I dream of lush tropical landscapes. We are in the middle of the Sargasso sea, the only sea with no coasts. Only the 1000-mile map on Channel 40, that tracks our progress, shows any land at all. The closer focus maps just show the circled arrowhead symbol that represents the ship on a deep blue-black field that represents the abyss to the west of the mid-Atlantic ridge. In the Captain's noontime navigational and meteorological report, the nearest point of land was 500 miles away in the Azores, and there were three miles of water below our keel.

I wish I could just sit on deck and enjoy my last few days of ocean, but packing (blech! ptooey!) must be done by Friday afternoon, and there are voyage-end celebrations that focus more on food than drink. Like a brunch this morning at which the Captain will autograph the back of my souvenir delft plate. And I will meet with Vera (see "A steel magnolia" from a few days back) at afternoon tea to learn more about her. And there are only four more days of Bingo, my gambling indulgence, at which I usually win almost enough to pay for the costs of my Bingo cards.

But I will still find time to sit out on the deck and watch the Sargasso sea roll by.

Playing hookey

Right now I am not attending a cocktail party with the Captain, Jonathan Mercer. I mean absolutely no disrespect to Captain Mercer, who, in addition to being tall, handsome, and endowed with a confidence-inspiring British accent, seems to be a highly competent officer and a prince among men. I particularly appreciate his willingness to explain things to us, like the time we suddenly veered off course so dramatically that it woke everyone at 4 am (it was a malfunction of the steering machinery, which the crew handled without further mishap,and which Captain Mercer explained without resorting to "There, there, don't worry your pretty little heads about it" dismissiveness). I even like his wife, whose charm is surpassed only by her lively intelligence.

No, my decision to stay in my cabin and play mindless computer games has to do with my inability to understand why anyone goes to cocktail parties and my growing realization that I Have A Choice.

In the first place, the Captain will not miss me. Half the people on board have been invited, and I am just sparing him the necessity of smiling warmly at one more anonymous face and making meaningless social noises for 20 seconds before turning to the next passenger.

In the second place, half the people on board have been invited -- the other half will attend a later session for people who eat at the late sitting. Several hundred people in one place make a lot of noise, virtually guaranteeing that conversation will be impossible, even should it be possible to find someone with whom to converse, which, in a crowd of several hundred, is, paradoxically, far from easy.

In the third place, although I indulged myself at the Murder Mystery dinner, drinking alcoholic beverages is not my idea of a good time. I imply no judgment, it's personal taste, I'd just rather have a ginger ale than a martini.

But most important is my realization that I don't have to go everywhere I am invited. It's marvelously liberating.

And at that point in the composition of this blog entry, I went to dinner. All the other people at the table had gone to the party, had drunk several glasses of champagne and eaten what were universally acclaimed as excellent hors d'oeuvres, and were feeling very little pain, thank you very much. Maybe I should try not being such a snip. There's a clear difference between a theoretical cocktail party, to which all my objections still stand, and an actual cocktail party, which may have many unanticipated redeeming features, though if I had attended, as they did, and imbibed, as they did, I am not sure I could have found my way unassisted through words like "unanticipated".

Sevilla

Before Madeira, we stopped at Cadiz. A friend gave me her ticket for a tour of Sevilla, a couple hours inland from there. It took until now for me to realize that I had a couple things to say about that tour.

First, I think I got my pocket picked. Lillian, a woman at my table, had been warning us for several days about pickpockets in Sevilla (known to English speakers as Seville because we English speakers seem to feel we have the right to rename foreign cities -- Beijing to Peking, for instance -- for our ease of pronunciation, though I personally have no problem saying "Seh-vee-ya"). Now Lillian is a woman of strong, if sometimes dubious, opinions, and when she insisted that "It's the pickpocket capital of Europe. There's one in every family in Seville , and they're PROUD of them", I didn't worry too much.

And lest you concern yourself overmuch about my loss, it was only 10 or 12 Euros (around $15) in coins that I was sure were there when I left the ship, but weren't when I reached in to pay for a minor purchase. Also in the same pocket was a Swiss Army knife worth twice the value of the coins (why lift the coins and leave the knife?) and several Kleenexes, some used, which I had vaguely considered as pickpocket repellent. Maybe pickpockets practice grabbing pocket change the way pianists practice scales.

The second thing I learned was the staggering amount of wealth Spain extracted from the new worlds Columbus' voyages opened to them. It was the huge carved wall of Cuban mahogany that was part of remodeling the central mosque into a Gothic cathedral once the Moors had been driven out of Spain (coincidentally in the same year Columbus first sailed) . It was the enormous gleaming silver ornamentation on the main altar.

And, oddly, it was seeing the House of Contracts in the Alcazar, the royal Spanish castle virtually across the street from the mosque-turned-cathedral. The House of Contracts was where the 16th and 17th century equivalent of venture capitalists came to get royal permission to organize voyages across the Atlantic to loot the New World, robbing people who didn't understand that, as Spanish colonies, they no longer had any rights to their land or their resources or their cultural artifacts or, for that matter, their lives.

Which was, of course, not the way the guide presented it. He was nostalgic for the time when Spain ruled the seas and was the wealthiest country in Europe. Hard times in Spain these days, so his nostalgia is understandable. The archetype of Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver is not just something Hollywood made up so Errol Flynn could buckle his swashes. Even losing ships to pirates and the dangers of the high seas and the occasional victories of the inhabitants of the New World, even deducting the percentage that doubtless poured into the royal coffers for the privilege of setting sail in the first place, the amount of wealth brought back to Spain was staggering.

And now, thanks to my Sevilla excursion, I think I can begin to imagine what that meant.

Not the Ritz

Turns out the hotel associated with that glorious restaurant in Madeira was not the Ritz after all, it was Reid's. I am publishing this correction so you won't register in the wrong place the next time you vacation in Funchal, which I highly recommend.