Fellow Travelers – Sea Dazed

Last in a sporadic series of passenger introductions

Day 171 – cruising Hubbard Glacier in Alaska – find Insignia on CruiseMapper

Circumnavigating the world on a small cruise ship sometimes feels like an endless summer camp, and nothing says “summer camp” quite like ridiculous team competitions for meaningless prizes. This brings us to introduce a sextet of fellow passengers Doris and Louis spent half an hour with virtually every day for most of the world cruise.

At summer camp, these would have been our cabin mates. Instead, they were our aptly named trivia team, Sea Daze. “Daze” is defined as “a state of stunned confusion or bewilderment,” which pretty much sums up how it feels competing with a dozen teams of smart and accomplished people for the best recall of totally useless minutia. Rock gardening was never this intense.

Our Dazemates illustrate the backgrounds represented by our fellow travelers on Insignia. They generously answered our not-trivial questions about their land lives to help us answer your questions about who we are traveling with. Here’s what they told us.

The Ohioans

Half of our eightsome are four friends from Ohio who have been traveling together since the 20^th century. (This sounds a lot longer than saying “for nearly 30 years” so we’re going with it.) Judy and Dave W, and Linda and Craig Y (last names withheld for privacy) met in 1994 at church in Columbus, Ohio. They hit it off immediately and soon were vacationing together. Vacationing morphed into cruising in 2005, and here they are now, playing trivia on their seventh cruise together.

Craig

Until he retired in early 2022, Craig was a community bank auditor, which sounded pretty low-key until we found out his accounting firm moved him around the country as the lead partner to tidy up local banks and other operations that had issues. Think of him as a lone Ranger who rode into towns to clean things up, get the job done and ride into the sunset to the next town. Sort of an accountant of accountability.

We asked all our Dazemates to tell us something people wouldn’t guess about them. Craig’s was that his father was born and raised Amish, and he grew up Mennonite. Knowing the value-driven practices in these Christian denominations makes Craig’s career as a lone Ranger for accountability seem natural but did not foreshadow his serious wine collection.

Craig was Sea Daze’s most reliable source for sports questions and, with his wife Linda, for music and other pop culture questions.

Linda

Linda studied education but, like so many talented liberal arts grads, went on to work and volunteer in totally unrelated fields (music, domestic services management, church ministry, stained-glass mosaics, acrylic painting, sales). Her artwork has decorated the multiple homes the Y’s have occupied whenever Craig rode in and out of cleanup assignments around the country.

Linda calls herself a “science fiction nerd housewife who loves cats,” but Doris and Louis will be forever awed by her ability to come up with “Peaches and Herb” in answer to “Who sang ‘Reunited’?” We had never heard of either. Besides music questions, the team counted on Linda for anything related to Star Trek, Star Wars and and basically everything related to stars, including zodiac signs.

Judy and Dave W, the other half of the Ohioans, brought sciences to the team. The couple met at Ohio Northern University where (we are not making this up) Judy was impressed that Dave carried his pencils in a plastic pocket protector. The couple invited us to a champagne toast of their 43^rd wedding anniversary on the cruise, proving (perhaps) that pocket protectors deserve more respect.

Judy

Judy is an MD geneticist who works directly with patients who have “things doctors don’t know what to do with” and their families. The only Dazemate working remotely from the ship, she has specialized at different points in her career in prenatal, pediatric, cancer and adult medical conditions, searching for genetic and other clues to diagnose and treat patients experiencing them.

Judy was the team’s go-to for science/medicine questions, anything you might learn as a church organist (which she does when not solving medical mysteries or cruising) and the names of every actor who ever voiced a character in a Disney animated film.

Dave

Not unsurprisingly given his affinity for plastic pocket protectors, Dave became an engineer (mechanical and system-integration) after college graduation. His more-than-30 working years took him into a variety of industries (aircraft, HVAC, oil/gas), with the common denominator of engineering small systems and their components, things like aircraft anti-icing systems for airplanes. Since retiring, he has volunteered for a community center in Columbus that acts as a hub for local nonprofit organizations providing social services. Dave modestly calls himself the building manager, but the building is a certified historic structure over 100 years old, which is not exactly a modest responsibility.

An avid photographer (nickname: “guerilla photographer”), Dave was especially helpful to Sea Daze on questions with precision questions like “What does the ‘zip’ in ‘zip code’ stand for?” (Answer: Zone Improvement Plan)

The Sola Travelers  

Dian and Sharon are among two or three dozen world cruisers making the world trip alone, a sign they possess just the independent thinking and fortitude needed to survive cruise trivia.

Dian

Dian was an educator all her work life: 20 years a third-grade teacher in her native Pennsylvania; briefly a sixth-grade remedial reading teacher; then 10 years coaching teachers of remedial reading. Except for a couple trips to Caribbean islands, she didn’t travel. Even after retiring in 2011, she did not initially travel, instead settling into permanent vacation in Sunset Beach, North Carolina.

That changed in 2016 when Dian pulled out her unstamped passport for the first time and headed to Europe. The rest, as they say, is history. Or, maybe, history and geography. Since then, and despite the pandemic, she has cruised around the world twice and visited 60-70 countries.

The team’s quietest member, Dian will forever be remembered as the only Dazemate who knew the answers to, “What movie received 10 Oscar nominations in 1973 and did not win Best Picture?” and “What movie did win Best Picture that year?” Her quiet voice was somehow lost in the brainstorming. Results: Dian, 2; Sea Daze, 0. (Answers: “The Godfather” and “Cabaret.”)

Next up for Dian: Kenya and Tanzania by land in August

Sharon

Sharon’s ancestors moved to Texas in 1832, six generations ago, and she has never lived outside her home state. Until a couple years ago, she had never lived outside Austin. Like Linda (Doris, too), Sharon’s college degree launched her into work that had nothing to do with her English major in college: business, administration, retailing, travel agentry and – most recently – proctoring exams given to healthcare professionals.

A single parent who eventually had aging parents to look after as well, travel mostly occupied a back burner until Sharon’s obligations lifted, and she obtained her first passport. That was 2007. She made her first international trip (Italy), and the rest has been history and geography for her, too. Sharon has now visited 140 countries and been on 32 river and ocean cruises. Next up? She’s not sure. “There’s not a lot left I haven’t seen that I want to see.”

What nobody would guess about her, Sharon says, is that she was a professional water skier in high school and college who also went to culinary school. She calls herself “the queen of piddle,” a nickname we can’t even begin to explain. Sharon’s gift to trivia was her random recall of obscure information not even she was sure how she came by but often got right.

The meaningless prizes for coming in first, second or third in team trivia are laminated pieces of paper called “Big O (for “Oceania”) Points.” These can be swapped for pieces of Oceania-branded cruise junk. Between the two of us, your Partout pair currently is holding onto 44 unspent Big O points. We are already looking forward to the Oceania junk they will buy.

Another Question Answered

Everyone wants to know, “Have you gained weight on the cruise?”

Sadly, yes. We have both gained a few pounds (under five each). It felt like we started slipping down the slippery slope to weight gain when we were quarantined with covid three months ago and didn’t have a lot to look forward each day except eating. We were simply never as disciplined about resisting the ship’s culinary treats after that.

Where’s Doris?

Snowy declared this photo shoot of Insignia fellow travelers too many humans for her to hide among and appointed Doris to do the job for her. Can you find Doris in the group photo of the world cruisers?

Coming Soon!

War in the Pacific – Part 2

Potty Talk – the Sequel

179 Days Down, 1 to Go