what do you want from where?

Last evening, I was telling a fellow TIP volunteer about my trip, and one of the destimations made her eyes light up. "Oh, I've always felt connected to that place. Would you bring me back something from there?"

Which seems to me like a great idea. I'm going on a round-the-world cruise, but a lot of people I know consider that to be a waste of time since there's really only one place they want to visit. And they'd like to have a souvenir from that one place.

So if you are such a person and want me to bring you back something, just ask. (If you're someone I've never met, sorry, this offer does not extend to you.) It won't be anything massive or unique, but I'll try to avoid handing you something that from, say, the Suez Canal that says "Made in China". I'd love to bring friends along, in spirit, anyway, and if you'd like to have a piece of coral from the Great Barrier Reef (unless that is known to contribute to the death of the Reef by over-harvesting) or a thimble-full of sand from Egypt, just let me know. I obviously can't haul back a bunch of stuff, but I'll figure out how to get you your vicarious souvenir if you'll just let me know where you want it from. Limit of one thingy per person. OK, two if that's what your soul cries out for.

Lord only knows, I'll probably be unable to fit into most of my clothes when I get back, there will be lots of room in my suitcase once I send all my skinny clothes home via FedEx -- or give them to Goodwill in Florida after disembarking.

RIP, me

I'm going to be musing about my death, so if you'd rather not deal with that topic, this is the point at which to bail.

OK. Death. Comes to us all, etc. But the question at the moment is, when?

I could die before I go on the cruise or after I go on the cruise. My health is not bad, but I'm 67. I'm currently recovering from what I'm assuming is flu, though it could of course be bubonic plague or one of those.

But the really interesting possibility is: what if I die while I'm on the cruise? Think of the possibilities:

• “Portland Woman Felled by Curare-Tipped Dart on Tour of Amazon”
• “Falklands War Re-ignites, Oregonian Is First Victim”
• “Leaping Orca Snatches Portland Tourist from Cruise Ship”
• “Easter Island Head Topples, Crushing Nearby Oregon Tourist”
• “Portlander Dies in Botched Malacca Straits Pirate Kidnap Attempt” (And we've got a second shot at this one when we do the Suez Canal and go past Somalia.)
• “Angry Camel Stomps Oregon Tourist en Route to Pyramids”
• “Portland Tourist Succumbs to Delight While Dancing on Greek Beach with Zorba”
• “Oregonian Insults Mafia in Sicily, Sleeps with Fishes”

Given my druthers, if I die on the cruise, I would prefer it be a solitary event. No collisions with icebergs – that's been done – no successful pirate attacks that take over the whole ms Amsterdam, no rogue waves that slosh a dozen or twenty of us overboard.

I'm all set up at home for it. Spiffy new will in a plastic bag in the freezer compartment, agreement with my sister Jenny (who does that sort of thing professionally) to serve as my executor, mortgage paid off to simplify the estate. Last summer my daughter Lizz cleaned up my condo, so no one will have to face the decade-long accumulation of crud that was there before. Nanette, who will live forever because the universe needs her spiritual strength, will give Ochi a new home.

And thousands of dollars will be spent repatriating my remains, if any (see orca and Mafia scenarios above), and the kids should have me immediately cremated and eventually scattered at Little Big Horn battlefield. (Kids, Omega Funeral Home over on SE 122^nd can handle the cremation for you. They'll do a good job and they won't rip you off.) Lizz will have my name and birth and death dates chiseled onto my father's tombstone, which she's already researched. And the world will go on without me, as it inevitably will in any case.

Advantages of ocean travel by boat

1. No jet lag. You cross time zones at a civilized pace with which your internal clock can easily keep pace.
2. If the medium through which you are traveling decides to become uncooperative, you can see it -- big waves towering over the boat in Hollywood disaster movie fashion. My ex-husband assures me that, even in the Caribbean, a cruise ship that encounters the tail end of a hurricane is dwarfed by the size of the waves. If you're on an airplane, "turbulence" gives you no clue that you're about to be tossed about. It also gives no clue to the pilot, who relies on weather forecasts to know that things are about to get a bit bumpy. True, there are no icebergs in the air, but then, on the other hand, given that we'll be cruising around Antarctica for three days watching icebergs float by us, that is not an unalloyed disadvantage.
3. Good food. Once I get going on my cruise (in 452 days, 18 minutes, 25 seconds, according to the app on my Android smartphone), I shall regale you with tales of what we're being fed, and you can compare that for yourself with what you would get on an airplane.
4. I'll be able move around without clambering over people. I've got these fantasies of walking several times around the lower promenade deck each day to partially counteract the results of point #3 above. Even just getting from cabin to dining room on the ship requires more actual physical activity than is possible on an airplane.
5. My own bathroom, in which I expect I will be able to turn around without advance strategic planning.
6. Amusements that go beyond six-inch screens you have to pay exorbitant amounts to watch.

And these are only the first six things that occur to me on a Sunday afternoon 452 days, 10 minutes, 55 seconds away from departure.

I think I may have at least as much fun being smug about going on this cruise as I will have actually being on it.

First cruise dream

It's 456 days, 5 hours, 58 minutes until my cruise begins*, and I've had my first cruise dream. I think it was a fairly standard anxiety dream taking cruise form -- we were going from our pre-cruise hotel to the ship, and I had to pack. I was stuffing things into my suitcase and another suitcase of uncertain provenance, not choosing what to take and what to leave behind because somehow I thought they'd keep the hotel room for me until we got back. It was snowing -- we seemed to be leaving from Seattle. The roof of my hotel room was leaking. A fellow traveler had confided her hopes of romance with someone I didn't know. The suitcases were moved out to the bus. I found I had failed to pack a little wooden cubic box containing go stones, and I wandered around looking for someone with spare room in their suitcase. We got on board. The boat left the dock, leaving behind it a wake like a speedboat. I realized my camera was in my suitcase, but I was so elated, I didn't care that I was missing pictures of The Departure.

I apologize to anyone reading this. Other people's dreams, unless one is a psychiatrist and is paid listen to them, tend to be rather uninteresting. But this seemed a Significant Milestone in my progress toward January 6, 2012, and I don't want to forget it. Even if it probably had nothing whatsoever to do with the cruise. I won't afflict my readers with any more dream narratives unless the dream itself clearly predicts the end of the world.

*Courtesy of my Android phone "Days Until" app.

Roberta is a geek, part 1

Well, OK, so I made my living working around computers for 30 years, you have to figure there is some strain of geekiness in me. So I have a smart phone -- a Droid X -- the performance of which is currently being bogged down by the sheer number of quirky apps I have loaded on it.

And one of those quirky apps is a simulation of a Star Trek tricorder, complete with sound effects.

And one of the things the tricorder will tell me is my exact location in latitude and longitude. Right now, for instance, it tells me I am at 45 degrees 30.618 minutes north and 122 degrees 40.442 minutes west, which is within spitting distance of where Wikipedia says Portland is (45 degrees 31 minutes 12 seconds north, 122 degrees 40 minutes 55 seconds west).

And why have I dragged you through all this stuff? So I can jump up and down (metaphorically speaking) over the prospect of tagging my blog posts while on the world cruise with the latitude and longitude of where I am, even in the middle of the ocean!

I wonder whether that will actually work. I wonder how my smart phone will connect with GPS no matter where I am. I wonder whether the tricorder will still tell me the truth when I'm watching icebergs not sink my ship as we cruise around Antarctica. I wonder whether there's another app I could get that would work better.

See? Roberta is a geek.

OK, I know where I'll be sleeping

Diane, my travel agent, and I have identified which cabin I'll have on the ms Amsterdam when she leaves Ft. Lauderdale at 5 pm January 5, 2012: it's 3305, on the lower promenade deck, a cabin with a window looking out on a partially obstructed view of ocean and sky on the starboard side of the ship fairly far forward.

The "starboard side" part means that, as we sail along the Atlantic Ocean coast of South America, I'll be able to watch the land go by whenever we're in sight of land.

The "fairly far forward" part means I'll feel more of the motion of the ship. "But Roberta, aren't you worried about being seasick?" No, because I'm refusing to worry about that and am instead looking forward to feeling like I'm really in a big ship in the middle of the ocean.

The "partially obstructed view" part means the room costs less than one with an "unobstructed view", and I figure a chunk of ocean and a chunk of sky will be sufficient to let me keep track of whether it's day or night and whether that pitching and tossing I feel is because of the ship traveling through storms or because I've eaten too much rich food and am about to rid myself of most of it one way or the other.

See? I've got this thing under control. All except the "obsessive inability to think of anything else" part.

unexpected details

While poking around on the Web for information about world cruises, I came across one blog entry from 2006 that reported their ship being covered in ice as they cruised near Antarctica, closing the decks for passenger use. It was in February (when my cruise will be near Antarctica). Somehow, I was thinking "February, but southern hemisphere -- it will be summer!". I guess when you get that far away from the equator, summer is a relative term.

When I rode the TransSiberian Railroad with Elderhostel a couple years ago, we crossed Siberia, but at the way southern side of it. My idea of summer in Siberia is 75 degree sunny days, blooming flowers, and ripe produce. Probably if the tracks had gone through Yakutsk instead of Irkutsk, I'd have a more realistic idea of summer in the higher latitudes. Or is it longitudes? I need to get those straightened out.

The same blog entry reported that the ship's itinerary changed due to "security concerns in the western Indian Ocean". So I guess they will do their best to protect us from pirates. Pirates. Argh, matey!

This is going to be a real adventure. How will I survive the next 16 months?

the route of the cruise

What's this blog about?

It's about my world cruise, currently slated to start in January 2012. Here's the URL if you want to see what I'm considering.

And why, you may be asking yourself, am I going to go on a world cruise? Well, last week, I got this snooty brochure from Yachts of Seabourne (or something like that), which I opened in order to sneer at its pretentiousness. I yelled "Dear God!" at its cost and threw into the recycle bag.

But it got me thinking. And the outcome of that process was, "Hey, I'm going to be dead within 20 or 30 years and probably health-challenged before that, and I should see the planet while I can still form memories and write blog entries about it."

At first, I thought, "World cruise. Cunard, of course." But then a friend with a little cruise experience said Holland America has a good reputation, so I looked at their offerings. They go more interesting places, and they start and end in this country. Tea and scones are all very well, but I really don't want to see Dubai or much of the Caribbean, and multiple formal evenings a week are not to my taste. (Let's face it, anything beyond jeans and T-shirts is not to my taste.) I'll get a respectable outfit or two to take along, but I suspect I'll spend most formal evenings sitting on deck watching the water go by or writing blog entries.

I won't have much to say for a while, I suspect, as details get worked out and specific choices get made. But given this great blog title, courtesy of my sister Jenny, it seemed criminal not to get something introductory online.

Besides which, I'm so excited about this I have to do something besides reading and re-reading and re-reading the Web page for the trip. I've got a trusted friend who's a travel agent getting specific information, and I spend way too much time checking to see whether there's any new email from her.

In the meantime, welcome to "Roberta Gets Around".