At Sea, West of Portugal: There follow some random thoughts about cruising. There is a type of long ocean swell that causes ships to creak, particularly in the interior open spaces. We are ‘enjoying’ those today. Hearing those creaks I always wonder about metal fatigue.
Longish cruises tend to have older passengers, very few who still have jobs, even fewer children. Cruise ship lecturers range from great to awful. As a former lecturer I always go check them out. We have one of each on board this cruise.
Our awful lecturer talks down to the audience, as though we were a junior high general science class. We suspect that is what he taught for many years. Our excellent lecturer is a man named John Maxtone-Graham and his topic is ocean liners and later, when liners were no more, cruise ships.
Maxtone-Graham is perhaps the best lecturer afloat, he is simply a raconteur. Author of several books and arguably a world authority on the liners that connected Europe to America, he is superb, witty, and extremely well-prepared. Of course his topic is interesting to us who cruise. We take long cruises, and that is where he lectures, so we’ve heard him a couple of times before. We are enjoying him again.
Tomorrow we visit the Azores Islands, a dependency of Portugal. After that it is six straight days at sea before we dock at Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t expect to do much travel blogging during that stretch, but I may do some of the usual COTTonLINE content: politics and international commentary.
