West Africa

 Friday, May 8 to Sunday, May 17

It took us 30 hours to get from Louisville to Cape Town and that included a 3 hour layover at Dulles, 13 hours to fly to Ethiopia, and another 6 hours to fly to Cape Town.  It was a successful trip in that we made all of our connections, there were no flight changes, and our luggage made it with no complications.  By the end of our journey, however, my whole body hurt: I couldn’t concentrate to read, my eyes couldn’t focus, and I had difficulty with my balance.  Our first two ports were cancelled because of the weather and I was grateful because these two additional sea days gave us a chance to settle in.

Monday, May 18, Day 9: Ghana

Our first stop was to see the Bisa Aberwa Museum.  Bisa Aberwa means “ask the old lady” and the museum features a statue of an old woman instructing children on the ways of her tradition.  Also in the museum are statues of Obama, Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and WEB Dubois to show the influence of Africans in America history.  Our second stop was to the Second Methodist Church, which was uneventful except for the fact that the church shared a border with a local school.  I grabbed a couple of my U of L coasters and started to give them away.  Right after I flung one to the crowd I could feel a few hands, and dozens of fingers, padding my back to get my attention.  A swarm of kids really wanted those coasters and they surrounded me and pulled on my shirt to get one.  I found their teacher, gave her a couple of coasters, and fled.

Tuesday, May 19, Day 10: Ivory Coast.

It was well over two and a half hours from the time that we met in the gathering space to when the bus pulled out of port.  It was probably the bureaucracy of the Ivory Coast that took so long to clear us.  Their government did provide us with police motorcycle escorts, however.  Sometimes it is the journey and not the destination which is the best part of the trip.  For example, just looking out of the window in the bus was worth the price of admission.  I saw miles of shantytowns where plywood walls and corrugated steel counted for a roof.  Sometimes, in a bow to modernity, there were satellite dishes poking out from the roof. Otherwise, I saw goats, horses, and cows grazing in the mud and the puddles that passed for streets.  When we drove past the local shops, I noticed that they were built from parts of cargo shipping containers. Meanwhile, we were touring in a luxury bus filled with comfortable seats, air conditioning, and guilt.

When we told our friends that we were going on a cruise to West Africa, the inevitable question was “why on earth would you want to go there?”  My reply was that “if I wanted to be a tourist then I would go to an all inclusive resort in the Caribbean but what I really want is to be a traveler and see how the people in the developing world live.”  In that light, there are two images of the Ivory Coast that will always stick with me.  The first is of a modern church that was being built on the outside of the capital.  The steel girders that made up the frame had collapsed on itself and it was apparent that all new construction had halted.  You can almost hear the people think, as they walk by, “we can’t have anything nice.”  The other image was of three little girls playing by the road wearing nothing but diapers.  They were about four years old and they pointed at our bus and waved as we went by.  It probably never occurred to them that they were poor until they saw the rich tourists in their luxury bus.

Friday, May 22nd, Day 13: Dakar, Senegal

Goree Island is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is famous for its “Door of No Return” where the enslaved Africans were shipped off to the new world.   The main attraction on the island is the “House of Slaves,” a museum with dark cells and exhibits detailing the slave trade.  Our guide said that the first recorded African taken as a slave was in 1502 and, since then, seventy percent of enslaved Africans passed through Goree Island.

Monday, May 25, Day 16: Canary Islands

We took a TukTuk tour of Las Palmas because it made our day special.  It was weird to be in a modern city when our three previous ports showed us desperate people in dismal living conditions.  Forty percent of the income for the Canary Islands comes from tourism so Las Palmas has just finished building a brand new mall, hotels, and an expansive park right outside of the port.  They decorated the park with statues, like the one of a giant blue man that was a gift of friendship from South Korea, and a huge tented area where the old men could play Dominoes and chess.  I don’t ask a lot from our tours, just a good guide and something interesting to see, and Las Palmas filled the bill.

Tuesday, May 26, Day 17: Tenerife, Spain

The members of the crew were just so happy to get off of the ship for awhile.  Cherise, one of the women in sales, was so excited that she literally bounced in place while we talked to her.  Our guide for the day was Sophia and she was a pure joy to be with because she was filled with youthful energy.  It was clear that she enjoys being a guide as she used to be a teacher.  “I still get to teach,” Sophia said, “only the people are much nicer.”  It felt good to take a long walk with Sophia because the exercise lifted our spirits.  It was a short tour but Sophia pointed out Trafalgar, where Admiral Nelson defeated the French Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is just over the horizon from her island.  She pointed out the statue of a sardine because that is Tenerife’s major export, and we saw the Aquadoro, or the statue of a water women, which was erected to show the importance of potable water to this island.  Finally, Sophia walked ten minutes out of her way to escort us to our gate and this demonstrates that the guides are not always in it just for the money; she was truly interested in us and enjoyed talking with us. 

Wednesday, May 27, Day 18: Funchal, Madeira, Spain

You just have to appreciate it when things go right.  We paid extra money to go on a small group excursion and it was money well spent because we rode in a powerful Mercedes van.  This mattered because we drove straight uphill for miles to get to the church and botanical gardens.  The weather was perfect for a long walk through the gardens because we could really smell the flowers.  Our guide was Helena and she knew all about the plantings in the gardens and gave us a detailed descriptions of why each tree and bush was important.  We took a cable car back down the mountain and then our last stop was at a Farmer’s Market where I saw a fisherman carving up a tuna.

Saturday, May 30, Day 21: Vigo, Spain.

The day was a wash in terms of what we were supposed to see.  It was so overcast that we couldn’t see the valley from the church even though we drove an hour and a half to get to that site.  To make up for it, our guide took us to a castle but it was underwhelming.  So I decided that it is the journey, and not the destination, that is important.  Vigo is the official starting point for the final 100 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago Portuguese Coastal Route.  I spent a lot of time looking out the bus window to watch the dozens of walkers who were committed to the Camino out of an act of devotion, to seek penance, or to get off the fast track and do some slow travel.  Most people take five days to complete this route.  Also, because it was a Saturday, there were literally hundreds of bicyclists on the route because even though it was a bad day for tourism, it was the perfect day for a long ride.

At Sea Days

I liked going to the dance classes but I never joined in.  It was just nice to be around the energy that the instructors brought to the floor and I spent the time by working on crossword puzzles.  Black, white, Asian, and Indian women all danced to the classics, pop, and disco.  It was fun to watch the old people shake their butts because they were not self-conscious at all and were happy to let their guard down to shake it in front of a bunch of strangers.  One lady danced while using her walker and another chair danced in her wheelchair.  It is easy to be snarky but they were dancing to get out of their comfort zone and have some fun.

On sea days, Tracey and I start off with two mimosas for breakfast and then I drank strawberry daiquiris for the rest of the day.  Aside from watching the dance classes, we played trivia twice and attended the various activities that were sponsored by the ship, and I went to the casino to watch them play poker.  It wasn’t much but we managed to stay busy.

Conclusion

Everything went so well that we signed up for another cruise.  In the spring of 2028 we will do a three week cruise to Chile, Antarctica, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.  Also, our cruise for this fall has been modified.  We were supposed to go through the Suez Canal, circumvent the Arabian Peninsula, and then end up at Dubai.  Unfortunately, with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, we will have to end our cruise at Oman and will miss Dubai and Abu Dhabi.  Norwegian gave us a huge discount and we took it because we still get to see Greece, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.  We have never been to these three places.

Caribbean

 Sunday, February 22: “The Flights”

We had a 6:00 am departure flight from Louisville but American Airlines delivered us to Chicago almost three hours late.  We waited at the gate as our departure time was pushed back.  We waited on the tarmac in Louisville for our turn to take off.  We waited again on the tarmac in Chicago because our gate hadn’t been cleared.  The long and the short of it was that we missed our connecting flight and so we then missed our cruise ship in New Orleans.

Once we deplaned in Chicago we went directly to the American Airlines travel assistance desk but the wait time to talk to someone was well over a half hour.  It was then that we learned that we had been automatically rebooked through Dallas but our plane had already left.  Our new flight would have arrived in New Orleans after the ship had sailed so it didn’t do us any good.  Unfortunately, our luggage did make the flight.  American Airlines wouldn’t deliver it to any ports of call so all of our things were sent back to Louisville.  Unhelpfully, the travel assistant said, “this is why you should never book your flight for the same day that you set sail.”  She was trying to blame us for this mess and there was no apology for delivering us to Chicago almost three hours late.

We we done with dealing with American Airlines.  Since we booked our flight through Norwegian Cruise Lines we called them and asked them to rebook us.  The first port of call for our ship was at the Porta de Maya in Mexico.  Our travel agent booked us for a flight to Mexico City for Sunday night.  There were a lot of hotels to choose from on the Hilton app so I picked one in the tourist section in the belief that we would be safer there.  By the time that we arrived at our hotel we had been traveling for fifteen hours and we slept soundly after a stress-filled day.     

Monday  February 23: “Chetumala”

The drug lord, “El Mencho,” was killed by the U.S. and Mexico in Puerto Vallarta.  Even though Puerto Vallarta is over five hundred miles away from Mexico City, El Mencho’s cartel was getting its revenge by bombing tourist areas, hotels, and even a Costco.  In an abundance of caution, the Mexico City police were on high alert and I woke up to the sight of at least a dozen police cars, with their lights, patrolling around our hotel.  Maybe staying in the tourist section wasn’t such a great idea.

We arrived at the airport early for our flight to Chetumala.  When we landed we found ourselves in the smallest terminal that I have ever been to.  I am proud of us because, at this point in our journey, we did not panic even though we had every right to do so.  My phone wasn’t working for some reason.  We didn’t have our luggage or a hotel room or even a cab for the ninety minute drive to Porta de Maya.  It was then that we knew that we had to depend on the kindness of strangers.  There was only one woman who spoke broken English at the terminal and she worked for a local cab company.  She arranged for a car to take us to a hotel that sat next to a Walmart. Further, she assigned a driver to pick us up the next day to take  us to the port.  It reaffirms my faith in humanity when this total stranger, who struggled to communicate with us, took the time and effort to work out the details of our trip.

Because my phone still wasn’t working, we had no reservations for the hotel and took the risk that there would be a room available for us.  Luckily, they had a room so we checked in and then walked to Walmart to buy enough clothes to last us for two weeks on our cruise.  When we got back to our room I opened my packages and it turns out that one of my two outfits was too small, so I ended up wearing the same set of clothes for the whole time that we were away on our cruise.       

Tuesday  February 24: “Costa de Maya”

Our driver arrived early but, because he didn’t speak a word of English, it was a quiet ninety minute drive to the port.  Our ship hadn’t come in yet so we had to wait for almost two hours outside of the gates because security would not let us in until we had a place to go.  Finally, we got on board and went straight to the bar to get a drink. 

February 24 to March 8: “The Cruise”

We had been to a lot of Caribbean ports before so we barely left the ship and, if we did leave, it was only to buy our grandson a onesie.  Aside from that, we played a lot of trivia, read, worked crossword puzzles, and drank a lot of strawberry daiquiris.  The only event that was notable was when we arrived in Panama there were about a hundred protestors outside of our ship because President Trump had threatened to take over the canal.  It was a peaceful march but it was a reminder that other countries have a lot of problems with the foreign policy of the United States.

Sunday, March 8: “The Journey Home”

We didn’t bother to pack at the end of the cruise but instead left our Walmart clothes in our cabin.  Fortune continued to frown on us.  The line to get through security in New Orleans snaked around the terminal and then into the attached parking garage.  It was so bad that the line made the national news and it took us about an hour and a half to get through it.  Then, after we boarded our connecting flight in Tampa Bay, we sat on the tarmac for over an hour because the airspace on the east coast was crowded.  We arrived in Louisville two hours after our schedule landing time and it took us about twelve hours to get home.  I am beginning to question why we travel so much.

“Funny Quotes”

• At our first port a woman, who was trying to sell us a tour package, approached us and asked, “what are you looking for?”  I was feeling a little salty so I replied, “a prostitute.”  She replied with, “that is not available.”

• There was a sign posted in one of the shops in port that said “we will not bargain down our prices unless you dance naked.”  I said the the lady at the counter, “I am will to dance naked.  Do we do this here or do you have a special room for that.”  Without missing a beat the lady said “ain’t nobody want to see that.”  We both laughed as I am sure that she has heard my joke many times before.

• There was a saleswoman on the ship who was trying to sell us a piece of modern art.  It was a naked lady made out of glass with the head of a rabbit.  When she pressed me, I said “I may buy it because it will look really good in my garbage can back home.”

 “The Passengers” 

As I looked around at my fellow cruise passengers, I thought to myself, “This is exactly what I am trying to avoid.”  They were all old people who spent a lot of time by the pool, letting everything hang out.  Both men and women had huge bellies, oversized breasts, and big butts.  It was kinda of disgusting and I had to turn away.  There were tattoos everywhere: behind the neck, under the ear, thighs, calves, and shoulders.  Some were huge, colorful, and artistic while others were small and demure, like the outline of a heart on the wrist.  Some of the old people walked around with zoned out looks on their faces and their mouths were wide open.  They shifted their weight from side to side because their hips had given out and it hurt to walk.  They had lost all sense of their sexuality and must have known that they were just one step away from the nursing home. 

I don’t  like being associated with these old people but we have more in common than I would like to admit.  Just like them, Tracey and I have been taking one cruise after another just to break up the year.  I have lost my identity as an Ironman, a family man, and a teacher.  Like King Triton from “The Little Mermaid,” I have shrunk away from who I was and am becoming small and shriveled, like everyone else.  For example, I have gained a lot of weight so my tits and stomach are too big.  When I took the stairs on the ship my breath became labored and I became light headed.  While waiting between shows in the Atrium Lounge, I fell asleep.  When I woke up and looked around I noticed several other passengers had fallen asleep as well.  They were much older than me but seemed to be mocking me with the unspoken message of  “This is your future!”

Stalingrad

Introduction

I don’t like to read about modern war because there is no honor involved and an ordinary soldier has no chance to prove his bravery. Today, it is all about machines. Drones are used to attack an enemy and they are so advanced that they can kill a single man who is hiding in an underground tunnel. Or dozens of cheap drones can be used to take out million dollar airplanes. I know this because I have seen the videos on social media. WWI and WWII saw mechanization removing the humanity from war as many soldiers never even caught a glimpse at the enemy that they were shooting at or bombing from on high. But it was different from the Battle of Stalingrad where the Soviets and

Nazis knew each other as they were fighting block by block, house to house, floor to floor and, sometimes, room to room. It was personal and brutal. What makes it even more fascinating to me was that either side could have won. At one point the Germans had taken over 90 percent of the city and the only thing that saved the Russians was that they had reserves coming in from Asia, allowing them

to stand fast. The Dantesque scene that will always haunt me was the thought of the crows descending on the streets of Stalingrad to peck out the eyes of the corpses for food as the frozen bodies were too stiff for birds to penetrate with their beaks. An estimated two million soldiers died at Stalingrad, plus

tens of thousands of civilians, so the eye-hungry crows had a bountiful feast.

Life in the City

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Germans used Russian corpses to corduroy the roads

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Snow was so deep that the Russians cut off the legs of hundreds of dead horses and used them to mark where the road was under the snow.

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So cold that one group was sitting in a circle and literally froze to death. Thought that they were still alive until saw the marble skin.

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Walking around in circles at hospital because had to keep moving to avoid freezing to death.

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Street to street. House to house. Room to room. Throw grenades in. Put up chicken wire. Hooks

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Stuck in one room for weeks. Everyone had to crap in the same corner and the dung pile became a pyramid.

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Soldiers fall on an old carcass of a horse, beat open the head, and swallow the brains raw.

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Russian artillery fire blew a hole into a railroad station, igniting the corpses that had been stacked against its walls up to the level of the second story windows. The frozen bodies became a gruesome

bonfire.

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The dead are lying, grotesquely twisted, their mouths and eyes still wide open with horror, frozen stiff, with their skulls torn open and their bowels hurled out.

•

Life in the Hospital

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Wounded arm and bandaged it. Line of lice going into wound. Itching and infected

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Starved to death. Autopsy shows no body fat and the heart shrank to one third of normal size. Severe shrinkage of muscle.

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Dysentery. Typhus. Typhoid. Hepatitis. Jaundice Combination of cold, stress, exhaustion. Exposure.

•

Wounded outside of hospitals, waiting to freeze to death.. Lightly wounded fixed first then sent back. Severely wounded were places next to the doors or windows so that the cold would take them more quickly. Head injuries took last place because could take three hours of surgery. Walking wounded got the flights out because twenty could stand in the same amount of space as four cots

•No fuel for heat so pneumonia, and an increased weakness to other infections.•

•

Shoot self through a loaf of bread to eliminate close range powder burns. Shot self in stomach or chest, more painful than arm or leg but guaranteed a successful escape.

Incapacitated patients who had been piled in trucks, which then ground to a halt, froze to death in the open. Piles of frozen corpses left by the field hospital because the ground was frozen too hard to bury them. Put bodies against the wall for insulation. A fire left patients to fend for themselves. One

guy made it but was on fire and sizzled when he lay down in the snow.  The lack of bandages was serious for the cases of severe frostbite. Often, toes and fingers stayed behind in the filthy bandages when we changed them. Top of a tin can for a scalpel. An article made from silk was taken apart to be used as stitches.  Scissors were used for amputations.

Lice

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Bury clothes in snow except for one corner so the lice could find their way out. Didn’t solve

problem but got rid of some of the lice.

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A trail of lice going up from the arm into the cast.

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The worst part was the growth of lice on the wounded. “On the operating table we had to scrape lice off uniforms and skin with a spatula and throw them into the fire. We also had to remove them from eyebrows and beards where they clustered like grapes.

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Delousing was impossible. Medical orderlies changing bandages found a grey mass of lice crawling on their own wrists and arms from the patient. When a man died, the lice could be seen leaving the body en masse in search of living flesh.

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Anger at their treatment in the pow camps led to prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off of their

bodies and throwing them ar their guards. Such protests provoked summary execution.

The Gulags

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The Germans limped on frost bitten feet, their lips were cracked right open from the frost, their faces had a waxen quality, as if their lives were already slipping away. Exhausted men slumped to the snow and never rose again. Those in need of more clothes stripped corpses of clothing as soon as they could after the moment of death because once a body froze then it became impossible to undress.

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Cannibalism. Scoop out brains. Eat the newly dead because their flesh is more tender. Sometimes they didn’t wait until the prisoner had died.

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Cannibalism. Thin slices of meat cut from frozen corpses were boiled up. The end product was offered as ‘camel meat.”

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Corpses without arms or legs. Human heads with the brains scooped out or a torso minus livers and kidneys. The cannibals were furtive at first, moving among the dead to hack off a limb and eat it raw. Their tastes quickly matured and they searched for the newly dead, those just turning cold, and

thus were more tender. Finally, they roamed in packs, defying anyone to stop them. They even

helped the dying to die. Scattered across the compound were quartered stomachs, headless

cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh and meat. They had thousands of corpses to choose from

•

While in gulag, going to cess pool, straining shit to get millet, washing it and eating it for the second

time.

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Mice descended on a soldier whose feet were frost bitten and chewed off two of his toes while he

slept.

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The dead were laid out each morning outside the barrack block. These naked, frozen corpses were stacked up in an ever extending line down one side of the camp. At Beketovka, the mountain of bodies was about a hundred yards long and six feet high.

•Conclusion

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Reading about it again to study it, not just read.

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The Russians regarded the butchery as a punitive crusade, a purgative.

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Out of 107,000 Sixth Army soldiers herded into prison camps less than five thousand back from the Soviet prisons.

Man, by nature, is an aggressive beast so there will always be war. You may as well outlaw hurricanes.

The Body Keeps the Score

         I read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk because it has been on the New York Times best seller list for so long.  It is not the type of book that I would usually read but I decided to give it a try because I want to learn more bout myself.  Some of the passages hit me so hard that I wrote a blog entry about it.

        The key issue of the nature of the parent-child relationship is how parents felt about, and interacted with, their kids.  Did the parents fail to greet their kids when they had been away?  Did their parents’ faces never light up when they looked at them.  A mother who was too depressed to notice them.  A father who treated them like he wished they had never been born.

        The children of unpredictable parents often clamored for attention and became intensely frustrated in the face of small challenges.  These are the people who felt unwanted as children and don’t remember feeling safe with anyone while growing up.

        Some kids’ disturbing behavior started out as frustrated attempts to communicate distress. When they walk around projecting the message “Don’t mess with me,” they are not likely to be bothered.  Some people don’t remember anybody with whom they felt safe.  For them, engaging with dogs may be much safer than dealing with human beings.  Managing your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems: dissociation, despair, addiction, disconnections and explosions.

        It is common for traumatized people to lose all memory of events in question only to regain access to them in bits and pieces at a later date.  Memories that you experience are not something with a beginning, a middle, and an end but rather in fragments of sensations, images, and emotions. Flashes of images that keep flooding into the mind and they can’t be stopped.  People who suffer flashbacks often organize their lives around trying to protect against them.  They may compulsively go to the gym to pump iron or they may numb themselves with alcohol.  

        Many mental health problems, from drug addiction to alcoholism, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of of our emotions.  Alcoholism starts off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of human contact and support.

        Almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal, as in the case of habitually becoming enraged or overexcited.  Friends and family members can lose patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt.  No one is interested in the bad news that they have to report.  They often survive with resigned compliance.

        There are many split off parts in the human psyche that were created in order to survive so that your undamaged self can emerge.  Managers, for example, prevent humiliation and abandonment to keep the person organized and safe.  Managers who are obsessed with power are usually created as a bulwark against feeling helpless. They are not emotionally available. Firefighters will do anything to make the emotional pain go away and protect against self harm. Exiles are rejected, weak, unloved, and abandoned children.  Keeping exiles hidden prevents intimacy or joy.  The critic criticizes others; they want to hurt others first so that the other doesn’t dare to hurt them.  The critic is protecting the self from hurt and humiliation.  They are perfectly put together by a scathing inner critic.  

In conclusion, I recognize myself in a lot of these passages.  “The Body Keeps the Score” reminds me a lot of the psychology class that I took as an undergrad in that what it stated should be obvious. I just needed someone to point it out to me.  

Australia

         It all began with the QR code.  We checked into American Airlines for our trip to Australia and the lady at the counter said that we needed a visa before she could let us on board.  This has happened before so we knew that it was a simple and easy process.  I down loaded the app, applied for a visa, and almost immediately received a registration number but the lady insisted that Australia would email a QR code to me and that in order to get on the plane, she needed to scan that code.  We waited for over two hours and the code was not sent to us.  The plane took off without us and we went home.

        Tracey immediately called Norwegian when we arrived home and they said that we could meet the ship in Melbourne.  We would miss the first couple of days on the cruise but could still enjoy some of our vacation.  I booked a flight with Delta, avoiding American Airlines with the thought that they had given us some bad information.  Sure enough, the attendant from Delta barely even looked at our registration number and we were allowed on the flight.  When we arrived at the pier in Melbourne I found myself looking wide-eyed over the horizon, searching for our ship, as I had visions of strawberry daiquiris dancing in my head.  Only there was no ship.  The security guard at the pier said that Norwegian had cancelled the port in Melbourne due to inclement weather.  We called for an Uber and went back to the airport.

         So there we are, stuck at an empty pier with no phone service and no internet.  However, we had a Christmas angel on this trip.  Tom was an eighteen year old waiter who worked at a restaurant on the pier. He allowed us access to his hotspot and then generously handed over his phone for us to use.  Without that phone we literally had no way of getting an Uber or contacting Norwegian to ask them to buy us tickets for our flight home.  We were on Tom’s phone for at least two hours trying to figure out what our next move should be.  I assured him that, as we were using an 800 number, there would be no charge for our call to his phone, and then I slipped him a twenty dollar bill for helping out two strangers who were clearly in dire straights. 

        Our second Christmas angel was Peter, who manages the emergency phone calls for Norwegian.  The two hours that we spent on Tom’s phone was spent to ask Peter how we could get out of the mess that we were in.  He said that the ship had been diverted to Wellington and there were no flights available to meet our ship because it was only in that port for one day.  If we had only known that then we could have as easily flown from Louisville into Wellington as we did to Melbourne.  Peter promised to follow up with our case in the new year and told us to make detailed notes and to keep all of our receipts for when we filed a claim.  All that we were asking for was a reimbursement for the part of the cruise that we missed because Norwegian didn’t inform us of the change in the route.  Peter said that it was likely that we would get a refund and he booked us on a flight back to Louisville.

        Another Christmas angel was Natalena, the Qantas attendant at the Melbourne airport who arranged our seats back to the U.S..  She took our case seriously, labeling it as an emergency, and ignored the long line of people behind us.  “Don’t worry about the line,” Natalena said.  “We take one customer at a time.”  She gave us the best seats available, kept our layovers to a minimum, and made sure that our account was labeled “special needs” because Tracey is blind.  Tom, Peter, and Natalena were just three of the many angels on this trip who showed us small acts of kindness because we were clearly a couple in distress.    

        Actually, if it weren’t for missing the ship, we had a pretty good trip.  We saved $2,000 per ticket on our flight to Melbourne by having a day’s worth of layovers in Atlanta and Los Angeles.  Also, I thought that it would be better if we were in transit rather than sitting around the condo and feeling sorry for ourselves while waiting two days for the ship to arrive in Melbourne.  While in Atlanta we visited the Martin Luther King National Historic Park which features his grave and a large reflection pool.  Tracey was able to feel the wheel of the wagon which carried MLK’s coffin and the bullet hole in the pew where his mother was shot and killed.  While in L.A., we took a tour of the homes of the stars, like Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney, and the Santa Monica pier.  

        A trip like this is enough to tear apart even the strongest of couples so I am proud of the fact that Tracey and I didn’t turn on each other.  There was no permanent damage to our marriage.  The only thing that we really lost is time as we expect for Norwegian to refund at least part of our money for sending us to a port where the ship didn’t dock.  Also, we have several more trips planned through Norwegian so, while we are disappointed, it wasn’t a trip of a lifetime like it would be for a lot of couples.