Cruise: Portugal and Spain

There is no shortage of ways to define insanity, but the phenomenon contains such variety, that there should always be room for one more: Insanity is heading off on your first cruise, trans-Atlantic, rooming with someone whom you’ve met once over supper a few weeks before departure. To raise the stakes, add that you have an immutable and critical deadline on a project, the raw material for which does not come in until an hour before boarding time.

It must have been February when Sam (my ex- and still very close friend) called me and said “I’m going to tempt you.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

Sam, who monitors all kinds of things, especially things associated with travel and transportation--he and his partner travel all the time; they are in Europe even as I write this--had found a cruise, a repositioning cruise (Those of you who are experienced cruisers will be familiar with the term; it was new to me) from Ft Lauderdale to Barcelona with stops in Lisbon, Cádiz, and Mallorca--thirteen nights--with cabins starting at $489, double occupancy. Sam and Jeff already had a full travel schedule and couldn’t take this cruise, but Sam desperately wanted someone to go, a kind of vicarious trip.

It was a big boat, Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas, bigger, Sam said, than any ship he’d ever been on; big enough, I was to find out, to be seen from across town towering over buildings in Lisbon, Cádiz, and Palma.

I looked at my calendar. The cruise left Ft Lauderdale on May1; spring classes ended (and I returned to Atlanta from Houston) on April 28; my undergraduate papers were due at 11am May 1; my graduate seminar papers on May 5; and grades were due by 5pm ET on May 8. Sam assured me there would be WiFi on the ship, though it would be very expensive, not very fast, and maybe not entirely reliable. I would need to use it efficiently and allow margins for downtimes--no waiting until 4:50pm on May 8 to try to submit grades.

I beat the bushes among my friends, and though several expressed interest, it was always accompanied by regrets. No one had two weeks on such short notice. I posted this as a “trip” to the Wilderness Network Website. No bites. I gave up. At $489, this was a deal I couldn’t refuse. At almost $1000 for single occupancy, it was still a pretty good deal, but a deal that would come along again.

On March 12, my WNG friend Miguel and I were scheduled to have supper together. I was about to head to south Florida to do a program review at Florida Gulf Coast University, and I was taking the opportunity to scout the Everglades National Park for a trip Miguel and I are planning for WNG for March, 2015. That afternoon, Miguel sent me a text message asking if he could bring his friend Pete to supper. Pete had grown up in Miami and knows a bit about the Everglades. I said “Sure!”

Over supper, we talked about the ‘glades, what I should look for, what kinds of questions I should ask, then the discussion turned to WNG in general, the (relatively) new Website, how trips get posted and filled. I said I hadn’t had any luck posting the cruise. “Cruise? What cruise?” said Pete. Two-and-a-half hours later, we were booked to be cabin mates for a two-week cruise to Barcelona.

And, if that was not foolhardy enough, we agreed to spend three days together in Barcelona before Pete headed off to Munich and I headed to Madrid and then home.

Pete had time that I didn’t have, and he jumped in with much enthusiasm planning our ports of call in Lisbon, Cádiz, Palma, and our time in Barcelona. Actually, the original agreement had me working on two of those, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, Pete cheerfully picked up the slack. He did a great job. We did all our ports on our own, walking, according to my Misfit monitor, between 8 and 10 miles per day.

I’ve broken this trip up into “chapters” to be more easily digested, narratives and photo albums for the cruise itself, Lisbon, Cádiz, Mallorca, Barcelona, and Madrid, with an additional essay “My Trip to Spain” by my fourth-grade alter ego, Jimmy Darsey.

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Cruise: Portugal and Spain