The Cruise: A visit to hallowed ground, and going home

On Saturday, our final day of cruise vacation, we checked our cabin to be sure all has been packed away in our airline carry-on bags. The night before, we had labeled and tagged our checked luggage, and by the time we had our final breakfast aboard Anthem of the Seas, they had been loaded onto our group's bus.

With that, we headed down the gangplank to the pier and boarded the bus for the New York City finale: a mostly walking tour of (or what's left of, about a block) Little Italy, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Soho, Union Square and Washington Square parks; the weird yet impressive Oculus, a  mammoth combination train-subway terminal and retail shops and office complex; and what I most wanted to visit -- the 9/11 Memorial grounds, where honor is paid to the 3,000 who perished in the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.

The bittersweet, yet also oddly comforting heart of the site has to be the Reflecting Absence Memorial, the largest man-made waterfall.

Encircled above by the names of the victims inscribed in bronze on the parapets, some marked with birthday flowers; the water disappears into darkness, symbolic of the void left in the souls of families, countrymen and survivors alike.

By hopeful and defiant contrast, above looms the new One World Trade Center, better known as the Freedom Tower -- at 1,776 feet the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Plans eventually call for the "Ground Zero" complex to include, in all, five high-rise office buildings.

We did not see Central Park, a tentatively planned stop on the final tour; Manhattan's horrible traffic made that impossible, as the bus driver ended up getting us to JFK with little time to spare for lugging our bags through the airport's labyrinthine terminals to finally board our plane home to Utah.

After a half-hour's delay once more on the tarmac -- a bookend of flight frustration as it were -- we finally lifted off. It was near Sunday morning when, happy but exhausted, we landed in Salt Lake City, retrieved our luggage and got a lift home from our ride-share friend, Big Jim Coleman.

Be it ever so humble -- and to some, by comparison to the Big Apple mundane -- there truly is no place like home.

The Cruise: Casting off, a first day at sea

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

                                            H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

 

And, so we did. Well, not setting sails in the true sense, and hardly the wooden ship buffeted by the winds Brown likely had in mind. 

 

View from the top

A mall . . . at sea

After all, the massive, diesel-electric powered Anthem of the Seas is 15 stories high, draws nearly 30 feet of ocean, comes in at just under 1,140 feet long, and is more than 160 feet at the beam.

 

In other words, with 5,000 souls on board, it was a city afloat, and it would take the fringe waves of a tropical storm late in the cruise for us to even be aware of the Atlantic's motions. But it was still adventure for us, 21st century seniors' style. 

It was our first day "at sea," having left NYC en route to Boston Harbor. Barbara and I determined to start at the bottom deck, and work out way up through several levels of restaurants, shops, esplanades,and theaters to the top, 15th level. At the top was where a quarter-mile plus walking/running path wound around the railings and deck chairs (and bars, pools, a climbing wall, skydiving simulator, and the North Star -- a 300-foot-above-sea-level elevated, glass-enclosed observation platform) were features.

 

 In other words, we easily topped our "steps" goal that day, roughly 4 miles worth. Indeed, between roaming this sea-going world and our tours at our ports of call, we did well with the exercise . . . and good thing, too, since it helped burn off the steak, lobster, and (once, never again) escargot, and associated culinary decadence cruise ships are (in)famous for.

Barb, feeling her Norwegian Cheerio-Os

It was all overwhelming, at first, and fascinating. 

 

The crew hailed from no less than 65 countries; our waitress was a Ukrainian woman -- who spotted my Orthodox Christian prayer rope bracelet and greeted us with a smile and friendliness (it seemed a bit more than the expected to me, but who knows). 

 

We would learn she and her husband worked on the ship, entrusting their two young children to her mother back in Odessa during their shifts.

Sunrise, from the 13th deck

 

Impressive as all this was, for me one of the best features was our cabin on the 13th deck, with a small balcony. 

 

From there, watching sunrises and sunsets, or just letting the sounds and sites and salt air of the ocean waves soothe mind and spirit, were priceless.

The Sun now rose upon the right:

Out of the sea came he,

Still hid in mist, and on the left

Went down into the sea.

                 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

 

The Cruise: A bumpy flight, a New Jersey bus, and a ferry to Liberty Island

It's a four-and-a-half hour flight, Delta says, from Salt Lake City to JFK International Airport. Add on early check-in on our departure date (9/11) for heightened security, several luggage and body scans, and time on the tarmacs and it was more like nine hours.

That's air travel in the U.S.A. 18 years after Islamic jihadists killed more than 4,000 Americans by turning three airliners into terrorist bombs that blasted New York City, Washington, D.C., and a Pennsylvania field.

But this is not a complaint. It is the new normal for us, and Barbara and I, along with 25 other Utahns signed up for a 10-day cruise along the northeastern coast of the United States and Canada, accepted all this as part of what likely will be a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

Lady Liberty

We had saved for years with this in mind. The idea had been to celebrate our 45th anniversary with the cruise, but the failing health of my parents, so evident as 2018 drew to a close, convinced us to hold off. When we buried my mother and father within five months of each other, we decided it was time.

Time to leave mourning for life, to mark our 46 years together. While we could. Because when you get into those so-called "golden years," they can be few, as well as many. Health can be fleeting; there are no guarantees that what one can do today, one can do a year later.

So, our luggage loaded onto a bus that waited for us while we took a ferry destined to Liberty Island; we churned to Ellis Island on the way, a brief stop for photos and exploring where Barbara's forebearers from Norway first landed en route to North Dakota. (Mine had arrived earlier at Jamestown, Virginia, indentured Welsh farm labor in the hold of a 1658 British landowner's ship).

Ellis Island train terminal

We saw the massive immigrant sorting halls, dormitories, and now-abandoned train lines from where those cleared by doctors rode off in cattle cars (we were told) to their American Dream.

Ellis Island

Liberty Island was next. Lady Liberty looked small against the New York City skyline, until we landed and walked beneath her 300-foot shadow. Barbara and I settled for the view from the monument's pedestal, roughly 140 feet up -- still impressive.

I wondered, even as I registered awe at the monument's architectural immensity, if Lady Liberty truly stirs the hearts of newcomers to our nation as it must have done for Barbara's ancestors? Or, have we become too complacent, jaded even, about the freedoms so many Americans shed their blood to protect?

I let the internal debate fade, as Barbara took my hand, and we walked down the steps to our ferry back to the New Jersey shore and our hotel room.

The next morning would be an early one, another bus ride to the Port of Bayonne and our home for the next 10 days: Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas.
(To be continued)

A 9/11 World Trade Center girder

The Cruise: On countering a year of loss, with celebration of life

Death and loss had become an unwelcome companion in 2019. First my father, then three months later, my mother.

Never mind that for both -- one afflicted with severe arthritis and dementia at 96, the other with Alzheimer's and in a near vegetative status at 91 -- the end of life on this planet was a blessing.

It was still . . . death. It was emptiness, where once resided the breath of parents who had loved unconditionally for 66 of my years on Earth.

While I firmly believe we will be reunited in God's light and love, But until then,  I must live in the here and now. And now, they are gone.

So, having saved up for several years, Barbara and I booked a 10-day cruise along the Northeast Coast, from New York City to Boston, Portland and Bar Harbor, Maine, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in Canada.

We chose to break the cycle of mourning with celebration of life, of seeing places and people we had never seen before.

New Jersey, New York and Boston were fascinating for all the usual reasons -- their mere size, density, skyscrapers, and historicity. And, they were confirmation that we would never want to live there . . . and underscored our appreciation for less crowded, more amiable and beautiful for raw outdoor variety of mountains, forests, rivers and deserts of the West.

I'm going to take my time recounting our cruise and excursions over the coming several blogs.

It is a time of life, and set of experiences, worth tasting in full.

Stay tuned.