Thoughts at Sea Aboard the Queen Mary 2, Part III
50 degrees, 26.68 minutes North, 022 degrees, 29.98 minutes East, or 1,000 nautical miles South of Iceland, heading 089 degrees.
Four days of hearing foghorns is starting to get tiring. Captain Wells has been ducking many of his social responsibilities, feeling more secure in the bridge close to the radar.
After a few days of intermittent access, the Internet is now gone for good, the satellite connection having given up the ghost.
People are blaming everything from a lightning strike on the Virginia ground station to late night watching of porn by the crew.
Instead of surfing the web, I am devoting more time to exercise in anticipation of my upcoming Swiss mountain climbing adventures.
I have developed a careful routine where I fast walk three times around deck 7 in a brisk wind, take the elevator down to deck 1, walk up the stairs to deck 13, speed past the kennels, the practice golf range, two swimming pools, and a bar.
I can accomplish all of this three times in an hour and do it with 40 pounds of books stashed in my backpack.
My butler, Peter, tells me there is always a certifiable nutcase on every cruise, and this time, I have been designated by the crew as "THE ONE."
The 2,600 passengers are quite a mixed batch. We have 1,200 British, 750 Americans, 350 Germans, 80 Canadians, four dogs, three cats, and an assortment of other nationalities, and exactly one Japanese couple who don't speak a word of English.
I took pity on them and spent an evening translating and catching up on the world at large with them. He was a retired dance instructor, which explains why he and his wife owned the dance floor on most nights.
They were grateful for the conversation, for during their entire 30-day cruise from New York to Southampton, then the Baltic Sea and the Norwegian fjords, then back to New York, they had no one to speak to.
Still, that was better than last year, when they completed a 105-day round-the-world cruise with absolutely no one to talk to at all.
Before they left, they gave me an exquisite, handmade, traditional Japanese purse as a gift. What a nice gesture!
All those hours on the Tokyo subway memorizing flash cards finally paid off!
