At Sea, en route to Ft. Lauderdale, FL: Today some random travel thoughts from an overly seasoned traveler. Earlier I was musing about dining on shipboard. From some perspectives it could be viewed as the major activity of cruising.
The passengers even joke about it. You hear comments like "Do we really need to eat again so soon?" or "I wonder how many pounds I'll gain this trip?" are often heard. I imagine our vessel as a kind of "feedlot for humans," disguised as a luxury floating hotel.
We are roughly a thousand miles from the nearest land. There isn't much but water between us and Greenland to the north, between us and Antarctica to the south. Each of those is several thousand miles away. And the ocean here is a mile deep, too. We reach the midpoint of our crossing at 3 a.m. tomorrow morning.
These are lonely waters. Unlike the busy sea lanes running down the Costa del Sol from Barcelona toward Gibraltar, where you are always within sight of several other ships, mid-Atlantic in these latitudes is nearly empty.
Any other cruise ships are headed the same direction we are - west - at roughly our same speed (20 knots). Like the Royal Princess they are "repositioning" from Europe to the Caribbean to begin winter cruising in the warm waters south of Florida.
You see ships you pass, either because they are going the opposite direction or because your speed is quite unlike theirs. We could be fifty miles ahead of another cruise ship and never see her until she follows us into Port Everglades, as the port of Ft. Lauderdale is called.
The Captain says we are trying to avoid a tropical depression that is to be renamed tropical storm Lorenzo, by sailing to the south of it. Right now we have a beautiful day, blue skies and 76 degrees.
