We were in the elevator on our way to breakfast when the captain’s voice was broadcast throughout the ship. (He calls himself Captain Johnny. He seems like quite the character.) Anyway, he announced that unfortunately we would not be able to dock in Jamaica tomorrow as planned, on account of the tropical storm named Sandy, which is forecast to coalesce into a hurricane overnight as it hits Jamaica.
The who now on the what where?
I looked at Beloved, who was looking at me with the same sort of open-mouthed surprise. Did he just say hurricane?
I don’t know what it is about me and travel. Did I ever tell you about the time when I was traveling through Europe by myself when I was about 24 years old? After four weeks of solo travel, which was both difficult and the best thing I’d ever done in my life, I was exhausted and ready to come home. And on my final day in Paris I got lost in the RER and missed my flight home to Ottawa. After a frantic (okay, hysterical) conversation with an unsympathetic Air France agent, I called my then-boyfriend, who had driven from London to Ottawa to pick me up and was staying in my apartment waiting to pick me up in the morning.
“I mu-mu-missed my flight home! Can you drive to Toronto to pick me up in eight hours?” And he did. So I married him.
And then there was the time we drove all the way to Nova Scotia, only to realize we’d left the key to the cargo carrier that contained all of our luggage on the kitchen table at home. My mother overnighted it to us in Halifax. And you might remember the one where I lost my bank card (the first time ever in my life, I believe) on a Sunday about eight hours before leaving for Mexico.
Murphy likes to travel with my family. My parents were on a cruise to from South America to Hawaii when the tsunami hit Chile and points north a few years ago, and I spent a few frantic hours watching the ship’s web cam to make sure it was still on the right side of the water. They have some pretty cool video footage of the water splashing out of the pools as the ship rocked to and fro. Or fore and aft. Or something like that.
So. Apparently we are not going to Jamaica after all, but nobody here seems nearly so alarmed as I am about all this talk of hurricanes. We just move slightly out of the way and hang on, I guess. And I suppose if you’re going to be on any ship in a storm, it’s nice to be on the world’s largest.
I tell you, there is NOTHING I won’t do for good blog fodder!
(Apparently this is our silver lining, the sun rising over Haiti as we pulled in to port this morning. Haiti post to follow!)
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