"It's Been A Summer"
Heat waves, wildfires, covid, nothing could keep us from Europe! I know I definitely took a 4 month hiatus from this blog, but do you know how many fantasy books I've read?! I'm back and here's the low down on Strange Escapes at Sea!
*I travel a lot. I *USED TO* travel a lot before the pandemic. Full passports in the drawer, accessories, shoe bags, plane pillow, carryons, collapsible duffles, you name it. I was always goin', man. It was life. We booked with Strange Escapes last November, talked with friends who'd be there too, and planned endlessly. Finally, it was TIME. We got the fuck outta Dodge as my dad says, and it was DOPE!*
It's been months, I realize, and for the most part I've been chugging along but for two weeks out of July, Ryan and I went on a cruise. A CRUISE. In a pandemic, (still, kinda). Listen, we masked up and separated ourselves from human beings as much as possible for 2 weeks before we left, to ensure we tested negative to get on that giant boat. 4100 passengers, (and it seemed pretty full to us) is a lot of people, and the thing about cruises is that you get to port, let thousands of people off the ship, and whatever they breathe in while they're out in the world comes back to the ship. We noticed the same thing our fellow travelers did: the planet's human population has like, 80% stopped masking and that's true of every port city and country we visited. So we did what we could for ourselves, (and thanks to kind weirdos we beat headaches and Ryan's "landsickness" 🤢 ), but we're pretty sure we heard the hallmarks of illness traveling through the ranks of our group and passengers around us by the end of the week. We all knew the risks, we took them. We all enjoyed being around each other. We have Kleenex and Advil.
The cruise was on Royal Caribbean, the Anthem of the Seas. I've been on 7 previous cruises and this was the biggest damn ship I've ever been on. The spaces and waiting and amount of humans and their cabins outweighed a bit of the joy of vacationing, but we had a fantastic room to spend time in, beautiful cities, and spooky friends to experience it all with. The boat was so much to explore we got lost for the first two days here and there. Finding the framed artwork in the halls that leads to your cabin is actually a secret cruise skill. A partially obstructed balcony will fetch you a better price on one of those style rooms than an open one, and we took advantage of that. Also - fresh air.