I have no photographs from the cruise while we were at sea.  Frankly, the open ocean, or even the ocean relatively near the coast, is not very “photograph-able.”  It’s a flat blue expanse below a featureless blue sky, when it isn’t a flat gray expanse below a featureless gray ditto.  That’s why most of the photos I took were in port.  I’ll get to them in later posts.

If I ever cruise again, which is not a given, I’ll want to find a female friend to room with.  There weren’t any real problems with my roommate, except that she is very close friends with the couple who organized the trip, and she preferred to hang out with them.  She and I were the only people in our group who weren’t part of a couple.  I can’t speak for her, but I spent most of my meals alone in the buffet – or briefly alone.  I soon found that if I sat down at an empty table with 4 settings, within 10 minutes or so a couple would come along and ask if they could join me; and most of them were quite friendly and chatty.  So that was interesting, and passed the time.  It isn’t a way to make friends, but people on cruises tend to be quite friendly and outgoing.  I was amazed at the number of people who prefer cruising as their chosen vacation.  I had no idea.

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I did something new in the summer of 2017.  I took a Princess Cruise – inside passage, to Alaska and back.  I didn’t do this on my own.  I sing with the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Dr. Lynne Morrow of Sonoma State University.  Dr. Morrow – Lynne – is, among other things, a scholar of African American spirituals, and this cruise was her second effort at a floating seminar on the subject, ending in a single performance on the ship, the last night before we docked in San Francisco.  I couldn’t go the first time she did this, a couple of years ago, so when I got an email about it in September 2016, I signed up. 

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