I am beginning to really feel my years. It doesn’t help that I am carrying around extra weight again, and I must lose that. However, my back, my legs, my feet, my hips, all hurt to some extent or other. I feel like I have old bones and an old body. I am really starting to realize that I am getting older. I hate it when you seem to hurt everywhere. Surely, there is some cure for advancing age, and I don’t mean death. Someone should invent something.
When I was 19 and called on a mission to Taiwan, I was pleased that I was going to learn to speak a language that is spoken by about one in four of everyone that lives on this earth. At the time, China and Taiwan were considered to be second or their level countries. No more. China and Taiwan or now leading out, and it makes me wish that my Mandarin was not a Second Language, and one poorly spoken at that. When I am around Mandarin speakers now (primarily Chinese who have it as their first and primary language) it makes me wish I had followed up on my intentions to study Mandarin and become fluent in its use. Instead, I am just a hack of the language and don’t understand. I wish Mandarin were my first language, or at least I could pretend so.
A large cruise ship like the Golden Princess is like a miniature city. We have approximately 3,000 passengers concentrated in a boat with 15 decks, a numerous number of staterooms, and lots of places to roam. If you book a cruise with your friends, you expect to run into them during the weeklong stay on board.
The last two cruises I have taken we have gone on our own. I somehow, despite my experience about this world, thought I would avoid seeing someone I knew. However, I ran into a long ago Cheyenne acquaintance, Kelcey Webb, from Cheyenne, Wyoming, during my August 2009 cruise.
I saw this guy walk by, knew I knew him from somewhere and he also starred at me. When I walked by his table a few minutes later, we starred at each other and then started asking questions. Sure enough, it was him. It was an interesting experience. I had been wondering, no more than 10 minutes earlier, whether I would end up knowing anybody on the cruise, and there we go, out of a nation of 300 million, I knew a family on this cruise. It was an interesting experience.
Is Global Warming something we need to be worried about. I don’t know. I do know that I recently had the chance to see the Mendenhall Glacier which is just outside of Juneau, Alaska, in a little valley there. It was a very interesting experience. The Park rangers told us that the Glacier has been retreating at about 300 feet a year for the last few years, which was different from the 60 feet a year late last century.
The real key is, what is happening here. Are we in a warming age (which they said had been happening before the industrial age) or is this a more recent phenomenon? I don’t know the answer to that question. Debate rages on both sides of the question. I do know that it was neat to see something that I had never seen before in person. I think that is one thing that can help a person stay young, is doing new and different things.
Different Cruise, Different Cruisers
Well, I have now been on enough cruises that I can believe that different cruises seem to attract different kind of cruise people. While this observation might be considered trite and easy to have resolved, I am still amazed that the Mexican Cruises out of Los Angeles tended to attract the yuppies from the LA area (along with some arrogant older professional people). The Caribbean cruise attracted a lot of the cantankerous New England and New Yorker types. There were a lot of rude people on that cruise. The Alaskan cruise attracted a lot of the down to earth Frontier types, sprinkled with a varied assortment of Orientals (mostly Chinese). It has been interesting observing this. What is the common link that I am somehow bringing to this phenomenon?
Normally during a cruise stop I am part of the masses that rush off of the ship and crowd the stores and tours on the mainland or the island or wherever I may be. However, when we went to Juneau we were in port until very late and we were back on the ship relatively early. It was like someone had yelled abandon ship!!. No one was on the ship. We would go to an elevator, and we would never have to wait long for one to come, and the elevator didn’t stop on every deck. Moreover, wherever we went or whatever we wanted to do also had no body competing with us for attention. It was like someone had yelled Abandon Ship, and the ship was abandoned.
With the completion of my most recent cruise, I have now spent 28 days at sea. I think that is kind of cool. For one month of my life I have been upon the oceans of this planet. I have loved it. I love watching the ocean as we move upon it. I have loved the wildlife that I have seen. I have loved the movement of the boats in response to it. I am not sure that I will ever feel satisfied ever again to just be a landlubber, though what I have done would not be considered sea time by those who have done this for their life’s work.