And We’re Done

(June 1st, 2016)

Well well well I have disembarked, with all my luggage and memories. I have become used to being on a ship, and being at a port, and having some identity there. This time I am not going back on board. I am, once again, a civilian. A tourist, in Europe for a few days, headed home.

On board, we had communications systems failures over the last few days, so the first things I must do in Genoa are still trip-related. Find hotel rooms, get trains and planes organized, that sort of thing. I am headed to the US East Coast to see Terry and Emma, but I am not flying out as soon as possible. Our timing is such that I can be a little lazy in returning.

I am not sure of my schedule or WiFi availability, so I cannot promise a blog update until I get back to Phoenix, sometime in the middle of June. I might do better than that, and I want to wrap it up before it goes stale.

I have been trying to put pieces of the blog into a more printable form. My mom says that she prefers to read things and look at things that way. She’s not so comfortable with devices. She’s likely not the only one. So if you look at “Blog Book” in the “Cooked” section of “Raw Photos”, you’ll see a growing collection of hopefully printable .pdfs whose file names force a kind of chapter-by-chapter sort. I’ll keep adding to them. Eventually I hope to make a printable book of them. Mostly it will be a picture book.

I have had a good time. It was longer than optimum, but I did get a good sense of the time it takes to travel over our world using the oceans. I also got a beginner’s sense of the freighter industry. I met many people, I saw a lot, I learned a lot. I won’t do it again, it was too long for that, but I feel fortunate to have done it.

In “The Innocents Abroad”, about 150 years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice.” We could all help the world a little bit by widening, rather than narrowing, our sense of community.

Thanks, readers, for hanging in there with me! For many of you, I will see you soon!