I travelled a fair bit when I was in the Canadian Navy – the North Atlantic, Pacific West Coast, the Mediterranean, etc.- and while I did get to visit a lot of interesting places and ports – I also spent a lot of time surrounded by salt water with no land in sight. I took the normal route to decide where to retire – “…start walking inland with an anchor on your shoulder … when someone asks you what it is … you’ve arrived… “ and ended up in South Western Ontario with no desire to ever go to sea again.
Or so I thought … one day, on the verge of a nervous breakdown from work, I wandered into a Thomas Cook Travel store … and on being asked … “Looking for anything in particular?”, replied … “Send me somewhere, anywhere for a couple of weeks next month”. That turned out to be the first of many cruises, a 10-day South Caribbean cruise on the Ocean Princess. It turned out to be a little different from the navy – better food, more time in ports, no scrubbing of decks or cleaning stations … you get the picture, right? So, when I came back home, I booked my next cruise, and my next, and my next.
Kelly, my lovely wife, who had never been on a cruise before, and I got married a few years later on a beach in Antigua while on the Sun Princess. That trip, “The Wedding Cruise”, is a whole series of blogs by itself. In December, less than three months from now, we will be on our 15th cruise together on the Celebrity Silhouette (11 Cruises on Celebrity – our favorite cruise line, and 4 on Princess). Many islands, excursions, great people that we met … I will be writing about in the future. Oh, and the 10 Mexican and Central American resort vacations that we’ve done, I’ll write about also.
I hope you enjoy …
The title of this blog entry is from lyrics by Irving Berlin – “Follow the Fleet” – 1936