March 30 - Turnaround Day

Introduction

When I am at home, in the snow and cold, it takes me forever to get ready to go out for a walk. First you have to find out what the temperature is. Then there are a lot of clothes to put on—once you find them: a sweater or pullover, outdoor pants, warm socks, and outdoor shoes. “Outdoor shoes” are shoes you don’t wear inside the house. They can be sneakers, hiking boots, snow boots, or mukluks.

After you put your outdoor shoes on, you remember something you left inside the house. You take your outdoor shoes off, run inside, then put your outdoor shoes back on. Then you start looking for gloves, for a hat, for a scarf. Then you decide which coat to wear. Trekking poles if it’s icy. Cleats or Yaktrax over your outdoor shoes. A little sunscreen on cheeks. Chapstick. Now get outside quick before you overheat.

Hold onto your dream that someday soon you will be visiting a warm place and will able to go outdoors without all these clothes and rigmarole. Just pull on shorts and a t-shirt and you are ready to walk. Oh, wait. What is the temperature? Where’s my sunhat? Do I have a water bottle? Map. Phone. Fanny pack or purse? Tissue packs. (You never know if there will be TP in whatever country you are in.) Photo ID. Proof of vaccination. Medallion. Mask. Water shoes. Inflatable beach toys.

Almost ready. Got to do the sunblock. Arms. Legs. Face. Back of neck. I need a little help with the backs of my shoulders. This stuff is so greasy — I better wash my hands now. 

OMG. It takes longer to get ready to go outdoors in a hot, sunny place than in a cold snowy place!

Chapter 1: Disembarking and Re-embarking

And so, here we are in Fort Lauderdale and the cruise is over, but we are staying on for the next cruise, which makes us “In Transit” passengers. We have to get off the ship and go through immigration. There is a facial recognition system and it’s easy and amazingly fast. Nobody can reboard the ship until they reach “zero count,” which means all of the passengers and crew have been accounted for, and it usually takes a couple of hours, so we decide to do a little shopping at Walgreen’s, which means about a 15-minute walk, and if we can’t find everything at Walgreen’s we will go to CVS, which means about a 30-minute walk beyond Walgreen’s And you now know that preparing for a walk like that is no simple thing, even when you don’t have to go through immigration or push through 2300+ excited new passengers waiting to board to find the special entrance for “In Transit” passengers. So, yeah, going for a walk in the snow and ice at home isn’t necessarily hard.

So, we did get back on the ship, and everyone else got on and around 4 pm we set sail, as they say, though “sails” were not involved.

Leaving Port Everglades, again

Chapter 2: Sushi  Susha

This part is out of order, but stuff happens. I didn’t want to leave out a mention of our wonderful lunch yesterday at the sushi bar onboard.

And a special Midori cocktail to wash it down. They are out of sake due to supply-chain issues.

Chapter 3: The Awkward Dinner

At dinner we ended up at a table for 8. Nobody knew each other beforehand, but the others immediately found common ground around things like:

• Heavy drinking—It’s normal and everybody does it.
• Underage drinking—It’s cute when your child does it.
• Smacking young children—That’s how to raise them right
• Grandparenting—Your kids don’t know anything, the rules they set for their children are stupid, when you babysit you should ignore the dietary and disciplinary rules of the parents of your grandchildren.
• I can’t even categorize this one—So proud of 19-year-old daughter who is a missionary and has gone to a Muslim country to secretly “help” women there, has violated laws of said country by doing so, and has had to sneak out of that country herself.
• And so on.

We excused ourselves and left before dessert. We rushed back to our cabin and changed all our dinner reservations so that we would never eat in that particular dining room again, thus minimizing our chances of being seated with any of those people again.

The color of the water today was spruce green.