The Whole Group of Lifelong Learners
Various Snacks in Reg’s Class
The last two days have seemed a little surreal. Everyone is starting to realize that the voyage is nearly over. Students are having final exams or turning in final papers for classes they started just over three weeks ago. Friendships and bonds that were made will, for the most part, soon be over despite heartfelt intentions of “keeping in touch”. Pictures are being taken and being shared and being plundered wholesale from the public folder on the intraweb. Also yesterday morning in the last Lifelong Learners Class, Reg brought out a sampling of commercial snack foods that he had purchased in the various ports for the class members to sample. Some like plantain chips were pretty good, others, like a rectangular cube of brown fruit goo, were nasty. After class the group went out on deck for a group photo.
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Steph’s Hand-Painted Nails
Stephanie made an appointment with the health and fitness center to have her nails done, with each one being painted with a different flag from our travels. For Trinidad with its black on white diagonal stripe on a red field wouldn’t be that hard, but for others like Costa Rica or Guatemala or especially Belize which have an intricate national seal as a part of the flag design, it must have taken an amazingly steady hand, and a phenomenally delicate touch.
A Bevy of Mini-Dresses
Last night there was a special four-course, end-of-the-term dinner in the fifth floor dining room. Everyone dressed up for the meal, which for most of the guys (including me) meant khakis, a button down shirt, and if you really wanted to go all out: a tie. However the girls made much more of an effort, wearing little black dresses (LBD’s) or brightly colored minidresses, with a choice of strappy sandals, high heels or even higher heels.
Dressed for the Special Dinner
Steph with Two of Her Students
We shared a table with Rusty and Carol who had been on several of the same shore trips with us, including the Rio Dulce trip we planned in Guatemala. They had had such a good time on that trip, that they bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc from South Africa to share with us. I am glad they had a great time but I feel I only deserve partial credit, with the rest going to Bonnie who told us of her trip with Gus and his company, Go With Gus, who really seem to care that their guests have a great time.
Us with Rusty and Carol at the Special Dinner
After a salad course and a delicious cream of broccoli soup we all chose the salmon main course which was served with rice and asparagus. I realized after we were served, that that combo: salmon, rice and asparagus, has long been my go-to meal when we are having guests. (P.S. Mine’s better :-)
Link to YouTube Video about the Storm Incident from January 2005 that Rusty and Carol were In
Dancing in Glazier Lounge.
You can see my red hawaiian shirt in the background
During dinner, Rusty and Carol regaled us with a tale from a previous voyage on the Semester at Sea ship that they had been on. The ship was trying to cross the Northern Pacific in January, and was caught in between two storms with up to 50 foot waves tossing the boat like a toy. An extra large wave hit the ship and broke the windows on the bridge which is on the 5th deck, splashing water all over the bridge. The water confused the computers which then shut down the engines. (Sometimes fail-safe ain’t so safe.) They said there was a tense couple or hours with everyone gathered on the fifth deck in their life jackets, awaiting the order to go to the lifeboats. Meanwhile ship was sitting sideways to the waves, being battered and rocked 40 degrees to each side, while the chief engineer tried to cut the computer out of the system and restart the engines manually. They said something about at 45 degrees of tilt, the boat would have sunk. The engineer managed to restart the engines, and the ship made it out of the storm and changed course to Hawaii, where it would be repaired and refitted, while the students and faculty were all flown to Tokyo, China and Thailand. So Northern Pacific in January = very bad.
Later that night after the special dinner, there was a gathering in the Glazier lounge with music and dancing and a fair bit of alcohol that various people brought to share rather than discard them when we disembark. I was mixing some frou frou drinks of pineapple juice, orange juice and rum and after a few of them and a little dancing, went back to the room and discovered it was 3:00 in the morning.
The Planning Pelicans
Team Alpha
The Venomous Dolphins
The Whole Class
This morning Stephanie had to go to her class for their final presentations starting at 8:30, and she asked me to be there to take some pictures of her class. By 9:00 I finally woke up, a little hung-over, more than a little sore from dancing, and ravenously hungry. However I had missed the breakfast service, so I had to make do with a coffee and a cookie stolen from the professor in the next classroom over from Steph.
Various Souvenirs that need to be Packed
After the final presentations and the pictures, we had to return to the room and pack up nearly everything before lunch since at 1:00 they would be gathering bags to help us by loading them off of the ship. With all of the various souvenirs we had bought, some of which are rather fragile, figuring out how to pack everything wasn’t an easy task. The bags looked ready to explode from the pressure of the contents, but hopefully everything is packed well enough to survive the ungentle touch of baggage handlers.
Dean Elzey at Convocation
The students all had to go to a convocation ceremony, commemorating the end of the voyage, while I spent most of the rest of the day was spent organizing, correcting, and culling my photos and posting them to the public folders as well as scanning through the public folder for shots I had wished I had taken but missed, or from trips I couldn’t go on due to conflicts.
At one point I got up to take a break, glanced out the window, and jumped in surprise as I saw a cruise ship, and an island! Where’d that come from! Looking out the other side of the ship, there was more island, two even larger cruise ships, and an entire cruise port terminal, with a cargo port off in the distance. We had pulled into Freeport, Bahamas, for a refueling stop. No one was allowed to disembark, we just stayed on the ship for the day while the ship was docked.
Panorama of Freeport Refueling Stop
UVA Members at Sea
Later, before dinner, there was a reception for all of the UVAers on the ship after which they wanted to take pictures of all of the UVAers. We took the pictures in Timitz Square on the fifth deck. After that they wanted to take just the Engineering school, but the people dispersed before it could be taken. We tried again after dinner. We lined up all the engineers, click, click, click, and disperse. Then someone realized that Rosalyn and Garrick weren’t there, oops. I tried to shoot them in the same space, lined up so that it will be not too hard to digitally add them to the group shot. We’ll see.
Post Panamax Cargo Ship
Also this evening as we were eating dinner, there was a giant cargo ship being guided out of the port area. Using the knowledge I gained on the voyage I pointed out that it was a Post-Panamax ship, that was larger than the maximum size that could fit through the Canal.
Again tonight there was a gathering in the Glazier Lounge, with people bringing the last bits of whetever they had, with no chance to buy more or even buy mixers. Stephanie organized a round of the game “Celebrity”, with Reg and Georgia, Nurse Linda, Gerry, the professor who’s staying on and teaching on the summer voyage, and his wife, as well as two of the living learning coordinators. Among the answers that were submitted were: “Abraham Lincoln”, “Pura Vida”, “Penguin”, “Genesis”, and “Missing in Action”. At the end of the game the two teams were tied. As it should be.
Bob Voyage 
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