All Choked Up

Day 162 – in the North Pacific Ocean – find Insignia on CruiseMapper*

We sailed a few hours ago from the last foreign city on our circumnavigation, and it was an unexpectedly emotional moment.

After 162 days of international ports, head-spinning currencies and foreign tongues, nothing unfamiliar lies ahead. No more new been-there countries to check off. No more new cultures to puzzle out. No more new food to discover. No more left-hand driving. New World, not new world.

Our sail-away was especially poignant because our departure point of Kushiro City gave us a special sendoff. As the ship’s lines were being pulled, a cultural delegation played indigenous music to us from the dock. Dancers enacted a poem. A farewell speech was delivered in Japanese and translated by a woman wearing a kimono.

As the ship eased away from the dock with horn blasting, a few score onlookers broke into giant two-arm windmill waves. Some of them jumped up and down as they waved.

“Goodbye! Goodbye!” they bellowed. “Arigato! Arigato!” the passengers lining the railings bellowed back. A child be heard crying, “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” over and over. People were still waving when they finally shrank entirely from view.

Bittersweet

We are finally eager to be home, but we were sad all the same as we watched the harbor with its little red lighthouse disappear on the horizon.

In the next week, we will be five days crossing the Bering Strait including two Wednesdays when we cross the International Date Line and do June 28 twice. We make one stop in the Aleutians at Dutch Harbor before one more sea day and then the home stretch of Alaska and whistle-stop dockings in Victoria, BC, and Astoria, Oregon.

The sea days ahead will enable Partout to catch up a bit after nearly two months when we were on land four days out of five and not able to blog as fast as we moved. In our final issues, we will introduce readers to a few more fellow travelers, offer some wrap-up reflections and answer any trailing questions. Faithful followers will no doubt be giddy with anticipation to know that “Potty Talk – the Sequel” also is in the works.

Only the New World may lie ahead, but every day is still an adventure.

Another Question Answered

Pat asked, “How do you clean/wash your clothes? Do you have to go to a laundromat? Have a service?”

We have both options. There is a launderette with six washers and dryers that passengers can use at no cost between 7:30 am and 10:30 pm. There are also laundry, pressing and dry cleaning services available from the laundry crew that processes something like two tons of wash a day, including ship linens.

Free laundry service is treated as a perk by the cruise line. In our stateroom class, we get unlimited free wash and pressing. In the more expensive staterooms upstairs, passengers get these plus free dry cleaning. Presumably in the less expensive staterooms downstairs, passengers get free laundry but no pressing.

We don’t know whether passengers traveling just a segment of the world cruise get any free laundry, but we know a bag or two without charge sometimes gets thrown in on segments as a perk.

Where’s Snowy?

Besides joining us for lunch in Kyoto.

Coming Soon!

Fellow Travelers – One in a Million

*A postscript: Depending on when you clicked on CruiseMapper, you may have noticed that Insignia reversed course after the heartwarming sendoff and steamed back in the direction Kushiro City. About three hours after sailing, the cruise director came on the loudspeaker to alert us we would be returning to port because a passenger had fallen ill and needed onshore medical care. The kind people of Kushiro City invited us to come back. None of us expected us to take them up on the invitation so soon.