Baltic Sea Cruise Blog: May 2017

May 13

I arrive at the airport for the Baltic Sea cruise in a flurry of worry – leaving my husband, afflicted with Parkinson’s, alone; the cost, knowing I should be more fiscally responsible – and have a small meltdown disguised as fury at the machine which refuses to print my boarding pass.

If you read my blog on my Winter of Discontent, you know I've been in a strange mood for months. Just a few days before leaving, we'd visited our beloved cousin David as he lay dying from cancer, and now we must miss his funeral. I'm stressed and sad and afraid.

Yet as soon as I am transported by air, always feeling as magical that transfer of time and place, I am suddenly fine. I am eager and open and carefree. Without knowing it fully, I needed this.

Copenhagen Admiral Hotel

We are in Copenhagen, Denmark, a city and country that, for some reason, I’d never considered visiting.

I am, we all are, smitten immediately. It’s a big city, clean and gorgeous, bicycle-strewn and humming.

The architecture is stunning: glass, pointy-edged buildings, staggered balconies that look like eyes, colours deep blue or black trimmed with white mix side by side with traditional, ornate brick, cement and wood, rounded, hooded balconies, monuments, works of art, and brisk colours. Mustard, deep red. Silver steel.

We arrive at the Copenhagen Admiral Hotel, a former navy barracks, and fall in love with our rooms. Wooden arches and ceilings preserved and polished surround the modern amenities. The hotel stands on a canal that yawns out into the sea. The streets outside are full of people, biking, walking, pushing baby strollers. Drinking or eating in the open sunny air. Across the street and a short walk away are embassies and the residences of the Queen and Parliament.

We immediately walk the area, enjoying the sun and a warm salt-scented breeze. It’s crowded but feels friendly, though not in-your-face so. When we arrive at Nyhavn, a large canal-centred café-dominated bustling area, we’re enchanted. Despite the crowds, we’re able to hop on a canal tour without waiting in line.

We cruise in sunshine and a cheerful narrative from our guide. Past outdoor restaurant areas like the Papiroen – Paper Island, a former storage facility that served the Danish publishing industries. It’s now filled with art and eating. Outside are comfy chairs where people sit and enjoy the food and the ambiance.

The Opera House is one of the astonishing modern pointed, slanted glass and steel buildings, somehow precise and beautiful at the same time. A roof that’s two-football fields in size. Perhaps it’s the symmetry that gives the new Danish architecture its capacity to take your breath away. 

A crane hangs over the canal, enticing the adventurous, or foolish and much younger than we, to come and bungee jump. In fact, our guide gleefully tells us, if you do it naked, it’s free.

Willow trees dominate the waterside, weeping of course. Tile rooftops, copper-green statues, fill the landscape with majesty. A swan flicks its tail at us as we putter past on our artificial legs and wings.

We stare at the Little Mermaid statue, an unassuming bronze statue of a half-fish, half woman, her breasts proudly displayed and her tail tucked around her as she sits on a rock and sadly contemplates the water. Based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, her face depicts the huge life decision she must make. Maybe that’s been her allure since she was installed in 1909. We can all relate to those choices in our collective journeys. Perhaps that explains the crowds of photographers, all vying to capture her face. Perhaps that also explains why she’s been decapitated several times throughout her history. She continues to be the most photographed woman in Denmark. We can’t get a picture from our boat, it’s too crowded, so we claim we don’t want to be members of the herd anyway.

From the water, we glimpse the Gelfion Fountain, the naval yard and the somewhat unadorned Royal Yacht.

Little do we know how these will loom in our journey tomorrow.

The Maersk Headquarters building reminds me of Manzanillo – our Mexican television, sitting on the shore watching ships carry Maersk containers to land. 

When the canal trip is over, we walk back to the hotel for a short rest. We have a drink in the bar and outside by the water. Glorious afternoon as we watch boats scatter back and forth along the canal to the sea.

Wendy, Carolyn, Rita and me at Nyhavn

We stroll back to Nyhavn when we’re hungry, and have a delicious dinner, though we opt for familiar Italian rather than a Danish meal. We are asleep early, which sets a trend for the rest of the trip. We’re not exactly party animals at night, to say the least, but we do make the most of our daylight hours. It’s hard to admit, but we are now the people we used to make fun of, the white-haired ladies traipsing through the world on planes, trains and big cruise ships.

May 14: Hopping on and off; Royalty

On the Journal: Part 3

At 5 a.m., the aviary choir runs through its note lines, high and squawky or melodic. Most people are still asleep, thus the usual swish of traffic is a faint whisper in the distance. Although I am not really pleased at being awake at this time, I decide it's a good time concentrate on the journal I've been meaning to write.

Prior to this gift of a quiet couple of hours, I attempted several times to pen my magnificent, insightful thoughts on life, love, art, history, philosophy. I always leave out geography and science and mathematics and not because I am so good at them I'd shame the rest of the world.
Love I figure I could wax prosaic about simply due to the numerous times I've been mired in it.

Above is an example of how I get distracted. I begin to research journal writing. I preach. I switch from pencil to pen to laptop. I make a plan. I never actually get to the diary itself.

Several days, I am interrupted by house showings. We have our home up for sale and it's not doing well. Everyone else I know sold their place in under a day. Not us. We like to wait until the market cools, then obsessively clean every day, and hop in the car and wait down the street while potential buyers stroll through. Voyeurs in our own neighbourhood. You'd think that would be a good time to journal, but with the stress of removing the last possible piece of dust and jamming the cat into her carrier, I barely remember my shoes let alone a diary.


When I do have time and still nothing flows from my fingertips, I glance back at old journals for inspiration. Here’s an example of an old travel diary: “Eilat. Amazing topography. Dinner at Pago Pago. ‘Wasaga Beach - even a ferris wheel’. Swim, Sun.” Isn’t that descriptive? Not for you, I’m sure, but it’s strange how these few words immediately bring back the trip.

 I smell the azure sea, blink at the reddish sand, wonder at the luxury of the hotels. Pago Pago smells of fish and salt from its open windows, a long wide wooden deck of a restaurant. Strolling in the warm night, hand-in-hand with my husband, we wander through a fair and I transpose back to childhood playing with my cousins and my sisters at Wasaga Beach. The fair a weekly treat. We have lots of time to swim in the pools and loll in the sun on this trip.

Another journal does the same for me. “On top of hill - Israel, Saudi, Egypt, Jordan. Egyptian soldiers at breakfast. Nuweiba - famous Bedouin group. Coloured canyon. Dahab means gold; city is yellow.” From high above, I can see the vast scrubby desert undulate in all directions. Turn in a circle and you can see four countries, our guide tells, so we do. Each of them burns in my memory. I am amazed, aghast, frightened by the beauty of the land and the ferocity of human beings. How can we as a species hold so much anger and greed when we have this vastness, this sandy parchment, these green oases at our feet? Naively I gaze at the Egyptian soldiers on the other side of the barbwire fence, calmly eating their breakfast, smile and talk and occasionally touch the assault rifles by their sides. Once in the Sinai Peninsula, we hear that there is trouble in Sharm El Sheikh, so we won’t go that far. Its history is rich and terrifying. In 6000 BC, it was broken off into Bedouin, Greek and Roman sections. The latter of course attempted to force a “christian” conversion on all, resulting in years of battle, death, destruction.

We pass by the port town of Nuweiba, famous for its Bedouin camps, but we see only rocky hills and pebbled dirt. We have a guide, a driver, and an armed police officer with us, because even tourists are subject to the violence this year.  The city of Dahab is a yellow bulb on the dirty brown landscape. Its name means “gold”.

This is what I get from one page in my diary. We don’t reach the city of St. Catherine’s and Mount Sinai until the next entry. So naturally I begin to think.

Perhaps, at least right now, at this age, I don’t need to write in detail. Maybe point form is fine. After years of typewriters (I can hear my granddaughter asking, Gramma, what’s a typewriter?) and computers, writing with a pen is slow, visceral. No thesaurus is a click away.

I like the idea of jotting. It’s quick, yet not easy: I’ll have to pick the right words that will trigger the memory to return. Yet obviously the name of a city, the timetable of our day, can evoke the trip we took. Perhaps that will work for day-to-day stuff too. I know I like making lists. This would be kind of a life list. Short, but to the point.

PS Post blog - sold house.

On the Journal: Part 1

     No, that wasn't an auto-correct. I did write Journal, not Journey. The two words share the root of the French "jour" meaning "day" and are therefore both based on time. According to those who should know and don't mind telling us that, we should journal daily, just as we journey along in our daily lives.

     But I am terrible at journalling unless combined with a journey outside my regular sphere. A visit, a trip, a vacation, in other words, inspires me to write something down every day. Not so much when I'm home, despite the fact that I would love to be a regular journal-er.

     I admire and envy those who keep a running account of their daily adventures, thoughts, ideas and observations. I wish I could make myself do it.

     Recently I have been purging my home of "junk" after 25 years of living in the same house. I discovered a whole bunch of gorgeous little writing books with lovely covers and decorative pages. You see, although I am sporadic at writing in the journal, I adore those exquisite books. My favorite is a leather-bound journal that I bought in Turkey. That one I use to write plot outlines.

     Reading over the short-lived diaries, I realize that my writing in them tends to become lists. Bucket lists. Financial lists. Shopping lists. Lists of ideas for stories. Complaint lists.
    
     Here is one such list that I found yesterday. It's entitled "10 Things To Do Before I Die". I wrote it a whole bunch of years ago, likely around 1999, before the 2000's even existed. I'm including a little update with each one, so you know how far I got with this particular list.

10 Things to Do Before I Die  (not in order of importance)

1.  Visit Barbados √ Two years ago, we went with my cousin and her husband. We had a ball. It was worthy of being on the list! But now it can be replaced with some other exotic location—or a return trip to Barbados would be great too.

2. Visit Auschwitz. Dreadful, I know, but there is something that has always compelled me to go there. If I fully believed in past lives, I might suspect I'd been there in person already. But I haven't made it in this life...yet. Surprisingly, no one wants to go with me, but it's staying on the list.

3. Have a traditional publisher publish my book. √ Thanks to Cheryl Kaye Tardif of Imajin Books (www.imajinbooks.com), I can check this one off my list. By 2013, I had five published! Not to mention a bunch of short stories in "real" magazines. This item stays, however, since I have more to write.

4. Reach my ideal weight and stay there. All I can say to this is, ha ha ha ha ha ha. Still, I'll keep it on the list.

5. See Sisbro be a HUGE success. Sisbro and Co. Inc. is my children's film company. (I am a not-so-silent partner.) We haven't made a huge success yet—but there have been strides in that direction. This one stays on the list.

6. Go on a cruise. √ We went on a Mediterranean cruise last year with a bunch of our best friends. It was awesome! Glad I had that on my list. Might have to see about a couple more of those, so let's leave this here for now.

7. Return to Israel/Palestine and see Halil and Amitiée. This one hasn't been achieved—yet. It stays here. Someday I'll tell you all about these two people.

8. Get to know Vince's kids better. √ As the "other woman", it was a difficult thing to be accepted or liked by my husband's children, and I didn't blame them. But oh my god, I am grateful every single day that I can check this one off the list.

9. Learn to relax. Well, I have employed some pharmaceuticals and red wine to help with this. Seriously, however, it's not an art I have perfected by any means. Leave it on the list.

10. Learn to take care of myself and not worry so much. I think I've done a pretty good job of this one. It should probably stay on the list, though, since it's something to practice every day.

On the Journal...Cathy

www.catherineastolfo.com


This is the purple diary in which I found my Bucket List circa 1999. I think I bought this one in Turkey, too. Should've written that down...

Home-word Bound: The Last Leg

March 30-31: After all the rain and gloom of the ride, we end up in a dirty, dumpy hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee. An overflowing garbage can greets us at the outside door, along with cigarette butts that haven’t been swept in weeks. Inside the room, the wallpaper is peeling, the cleaners haven’t touched the corners in years. The bed is horrible.  Ripped spread, pilly sheets, lumpy pillows, uncomfortable mattress. I check for bed bugs, but luckily find none. To say we are disgruntled would be a huge understatement. If we had the energy, we’d get back on the road and forget our sixty bucks. Instead, I write a scathing review on Trip Advisor. (Don’t ever stay at the Red Roof Inn, Central Knoxville!)

We stuff the sides of the bed, as usual, so Miss Monk won’t go under, but she finds a way and disappears half the night. We eat cold, soggy take out in the room because there are no restaurants nearby. I don’t even take a shower. I’d rather be un-bathed than get underneath the rusted-out faucets.

When morning comes, we are happy to see a sun-filled day. We don’t even want the free breakfast this place offers, so we pack up hurriedly. Monkey, of course, feels our anxiety and slips out of my grasp to vanish under the bed. No amount of coaching will bring her out. And we desperately want to get out of here!

So we push and pull the lumpy mound of mattress onto the floor. Next we move the two box springs—and when I say springs, I mean they should be called sprungs—apart. There’s Monkey, huddled in a corner. Not to mention what looks like a rotted dog bone, a pile of dirty cloth and a bunch of strewn papers. How all that got under there is not something we bother contemplating at the time, though it would make a good mystery.

Finally in the car, we are greeted by cheerful sunny scenery, some of it bucolic.  Now we are deep in the hills of Tennessee, followed quickly by Kentucky, enjoying the vistas with its greens tinted by sunlight. We see no wildlife in Elk Valley and the fog advisory doesn’t apply this morning. From the summits, we can see a ring of mountains etched on the blue sky. Jellico, Pine mountain ranges, the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The surrounding rock is stunning, geometric lines of colour. I know they’ve been gouged by machinery to create roads, but out of this destruction a lasting beauty has been created.  Dave Hunter (author of Along Interstate 75) tells us to watch for Exit 15, near Williamsburg in Kentucky, and we do. It truly is astounding. The ramp has been cut into the mountainside, creating two enormous mounds of rock, and the road now traverses a tunnel of granite and greenery.

Soon the hills give way to fairly flat ground, lots of rivers, rich soil. We are back in horse country, admiring the muscled stature of the beautiful animals. Next comes Ohio. Where we saw only snow sculptures at the end of January, we’re happy to see the light brown of fields drinking in the sun, getting ready for blooming and planting.

We stop in Findlay, Ohio, at our favorite hotel chain: the Drury Inn and Suites, of course! As if to compensate for last night, this time we get a bigger-than-average room, complete with a separate room for TV, lounge chairs and flat screen ready. Even Monkey likes it. She has a lot more room to run around in.

“Kick back” time is from 5:30 to 7:00. Hot dinner, 3 alcohol drinks each (well, 2 for Vince, 4 for me) and we’re set for the night.

By morning, we’re rested, have had our hot breakfast, and we’re ready to make the last part of our journey toward home. Miss Monk is not impressed, however, although she was easy to capture this time. At this writing, she is complaining loudly, despite the sunshine and some great music as background. Where are those earplugs Frances and Marty gave us?

 We talk about all the things we loved about our stay in Florida - besides our guests, this time. Being able to walk outside first thing in the morning to sit in the sun or slide into the warm pool was a joy for us and Miss Monk. Dining out. The Air Boat rides. Visiting Cugina and John's Pass and the dolphins. Cocoa Beach and the dolphins and the shark. Winter Garden, Celebration, Downtown Disney. Did I mention swimming in our warm pool?

We slip over the border into Canada without any problem and immediately feel at home. It's sunny and warm (relatively) and lots of the snow has disappeared. Spring does feel as though it has arrived...we hope. Home-word Bound!

Part One: Sahara and Miss Monk Go To Florida

     We've been talking to the girls about this trip for a year. You'd think they would be ready. Sahara (who will not answer to any nicknames at all, a family tradition that she ignores) complains, her voice constant and loud. Raven, whose name has been switched to Monkey or Miss Monk for a variety of reasons, quietly stares at us with a deep seated suspicion borne of the belief that a car ride leads only to the vet. We promise them sunshine and lollipops, but they aren't convinced.

     Into the cat carriers, we spray the pheromone stuff that's supposed to calm them down. In the freezing air, Vince plows through the snow to warm up the car for them. We bundle up in hats, mitts, coats and scarves and pack everything. Despite the fact that they have four legs each, Sahara and Miss Monk don't even offer to help. Once we have all the luggage arranged, the big pheromone-soaked pet tent strapped safely into the back seat, little bowls handy for fresh food and water along the way, we are ready for the girls to board.

     During the preparations, they wound themselves in and out of our legs, over our feet, tripped us on the stairs. Now they are nowhere to be seen. We wait a few quiet moments. Sahara, unable to stifle her curiosity, pokes her head into the hallway. I snatch her up and shove her, legs stiffened and howling, into the carrier. Immediately I remove her to the waiting, warm automobile, lest her howls spook Miss Monk. Naturally I am too late.
     Monkey darts past us and burrows her way under our bed. Now, ours happens to be a king-sized monstrosity with wooden sides only a very small child (or cat) can squeeze under. Judging from the dust balls, not even the Merry Maids have been able to get under there with a vacuum hose. Miss Monk has scratched a little pocket into the box spring. With a nice sharp exacto knife, we manage to make the rip larger, but she simply burrows totally out of reach. However, she purrs to let us know she's pleased with herself.
     An entire frustrating impossibly long hour later, several litres of gas keeping Sahara and me warm, and Monkey strolls out into the hall. Vince quietly follows her, down the stairs where she finds the doors shut, up the stairs where she finds the doors closed, and finally into her master's arms. (Who am I kidding with the "master" monicker?)
     We're on the road to Florida! The girls sing joyously - or should I use piteously? - for a few kilometres and then...silent resignation.

     Whichever one of us is not driving balances Dave Hunter's book, Along Interstate 75, on our knees. If you are planning a trip to Florida, we highly recommend it. (Insert commercial music here.) As Dave suggests, we take the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, which fortunately is fairly devoid of traffic. Under our wheels, we can feel the difference between the economy of the Canadian versus the American city.
We approach the border with a little bit of trepidation. We've got  our passports, the house rental contract, and the vet's papers, ready for inspection. Luckily there's not much of a line up and we slide up to a booth very quickly.
"Afternoon."
Yes, it is. Might have been morning if Miss Monk...
"Afternoon," Vince says.
"Where are you folks headed?"
Folks. Such a...well, folksy kind of word.
"Florida."
Always answer the question. Provide no more detail unless prompted.
"For how long?"
"Two months."
"Do you have more than $10,000 with you?"
"I wish."
Silence.
"No."
"Tobacco?"
"No."
"Alcohol?"
"No."
"Okay." Hands back the passports. "Have a good time."
You didn't even ask what the huge tent in the back seat is for!
"Thanks."
Right away, there's the toll booth, after that a twisting left, and we're on I75 headed south. The girls are still silent. Vince and I are grinning like Cheshire cats.