Friday Five - Cruise Vacation Version

 Friday Five - Cruise Vacation Version

It’s been a great trip, but we return home today to a full weekend of activities, so I’m leaving our ship with great memories, but no sadness - our at-home lives are very enjoyable as well.

1.  Walking the cruise ship deck track was wonderful. We walked about five miles around the deck on each sea day, and what a privilege it was - fresh breezes, wide open blue ocean, sea birds, and if lucky, marine mammal sightings. It was a joy, and left us both deeply relaxed just in time for our afternoon sea day plans of, generally, simply reading out on our balcony. 

Off-ship trip highlights were transiting the Panama Canal,  a full day affair, seeing sloth, parrots, and toucan up close, eating just-picked tropical fruits and freshly caught seafood, and sipping ice cold local beer on hot and humid touring days.

2.  We enjoyed listening to live music each night. Listening to a variety of live musical entertainment around the ship after dinner each night was lovely, and something I plan to incorporate more of into our weekday lives (vs our already active weekend lives) when we return. We do have ample opportunities to hear live music pretty much nightly, but in that it’s doubtful our energies could keep up that pace, at the very least we can play music while preparing, eating, and cleaning up from our weekday dinners.

3.  Cruising seems to have gotten ‘heavier’. The level of obesity that we observed on this particular cruise was shocking. We have never encountered it on any other cruise to the degree that we did on this cruise, and are sincerely wondering what may have changed societally since our last cruise to lead to what we observed. 

4.  Continue to struggle with the morality of cruising. The question I ask myself, and am unable to conclusively answer, is are we helping or exploiting our cruise ship room stewards, wait staff, back-of-the- kitchen staff, and other unseen crew, many if not most from predominantly poorer countries than those we guests are from? I just don’t know.

5.  Enjoyed our brief interactions with the locals. We very much enjoyed the small interactions we had with the local residents at our port stops in Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Most of whom were graciously tolerant of my halting Spanish. 

We are so ridiculously fortunate to be able to travel and see what life is like outside of our United States ‘bubble’.

We arrive back home later today, and will be happy to get there. The joys of travel are many, but so are the joys of returning home after time away.

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We called our daughters at one point during our cruise, gave them a budget number, and told them they were free to plan a Christmas vacation for the entire family in the warm weather location of their choosing, subject to the budget we’d set. My early guess is that they will land on either Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, or one of the Caribbean islands. Excited to hear what destination they come up with once they decide.