11/6/08 At Sea

One last sea day before we disembark in Sydney. I’m tired! It’s been a fabulous experience and one that most people, including me, would remember for a lifetime. And I’m sure that I will do just that. The problem is that it’s still not finished for me. I have more than two weeks to go in this adventure. In a couple of days, I’ll board a flight to Papeete, Tahiti where I’ll spend a few days until my ten-night cruise on the Paul Gauguin. I can hear all the people reading this saying “Poor baby! Forced to spend a couple of weeks in French Polynesia! What a shame!”. I felt the same way when I was planning this trip. I wanted to see all of these places and it seemed perfectly logical to do it all while I was “in the neighborhood”, so to speak. But after six weeks away from my home, my friends, my dog and everything familiar to me, I missed all those things. Except for business travel, I had never been gone for more than a couple of weeks. When I was working, there was never enough vacation time to do a trip like this one. Now that I’ve had the opportunity to do it, I think that I’ll limit myself to shorter trips in the future. Maybe three or four weeks will be just about right. At any rate, I find myself wishing that I was boarding a flight to Virginia rather than Tahiti. I know you don’t understand….

If you’ve ever traveled alone, maybe you will understand this. I will be starting out alone again once we get to Sydney. Everyone will be scattering in all different directions when we disembark. All of the new friends I’ve made, the ones that I’ve grown so comfortable with during the past six weeks or so, will be gone. I’ll meet new people once we board the Paul Gauguin, of course. But I really hate to say goodbye to all these folks. Friends that you make while on a cruise tend to be good ones. Maybe it’s the circumstances; everybody having a great time, doing interesting things together. Whatever it is, I always hate it when a cruise ends.

Okay, enough of that! I am going to Tahiti, for better or worse, which brings up that always fun, last sea day activity – packing. Because I am continuing on my trip, packing will be a little harder than usual. Ordinarily, the only concern is making certain that everything fits into the suitcase. If it gets wrinkled, who cares? You’re going home anyway. Not this time! Remember way back on day one, I said that I had packed everything I owned? Well, now I have to pack it again and some of it can’t get wrinkled. So I decided to lay both suitcase and garment bag on the bed. The plan was to pack all the things I would need in Tahiti in the garment bag, if possible. Things that I absolutely wouldn’t need would go at the bottom of the suitcase. Questionable stuff would be near the top of the suitcase, easy to find when and if they were needed. I had a plan!

The Paul Gauguin has no formal nights, only what they call “elegant casual”, so the dress clothes were folded and went right on the bottom. So did the South Island New Zealand stuff – sweaters, sweatshirt, rain jacket, etc. There was one exception to my logic, however. I did pack one sweater and a jacket near the top of the suitcase. It would be late November, after all, when I got back to Richmond! Shorts, tee shirts, polo shirts and a couple of pairs of slacks went to the garment bag. This process went on for probably a couple of hours but eventually both bags were finished. And I had remembered to keep something out for tomorrow. Does anybody actually forget to do that? I believe that Cruise Directors just think it’s cute….

With all the final preparations for disembarkation complete, I spent some time with my friends talking about all the things we had experienced together. We exchanged e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc and promised to keep in touch. Then, as I had planned to get up very early for the sail-in to Sydney Harbor, I went to bed.