Stephen Gilberg (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deckardcanine) wrote2012-07-18 12:38 am
deckardcanine) wrote2012-07-18 12:38 am
(no subject)
It’s time I provided more detail about my most recent vacation. It involved daylong travel from DC to Guayaquil with a plane transfer in Panama City, a much shorter flight to the Galapagos, seven full days on or near the National Geographic Endeavour for a Lindblad expedition, a return to and guided tour of Guayaquil, and a daylong trip back to DC. My sister Sarah and our parents came, none of us opting for Net access.
Guayaquil
Lindblad confused us by giving each traveler two paper luggage tags and two smaller plastic-coated ones, which had different styles but asked for the same info. More confusing was the airport’s use of slightly different cards to fill out. Mine said “Date of Bird.” Uh, sorry, but my love of animals extends only so far.
Wishing to learn and record as much Spanish as possible, I packed and still have two airline magazines. In the meantime, I was proud to figure out a somewhat stealthy pun on an ad in the airport. It showed a human finger with a face and tuxedo, apparently a mascot made to appear in a series. Below was written “Agente 00D2.” Cero cero de dos… dedos -- fingers!
As it happened, we spent part of 6/29 and 6/30 in rooms 629 and 630 at the Hilton Colon. (Why they skip the accent on that last word, I dunno.) It was luxurious but continued the confusion. You could not take an elevator to your floor unless you inserted your keycard in the wall adjacent to the buttons. We pushed a flashing light on our phone and got someone at the front desk who said it meant we should call a certain number for messages, but that number reported none, so we slept with the light still flashing. We were not surprised to hear English-language music in most of the hotel, but one internal restaurant played bossa nova covers of songs whose lyrics clashed with the sleepy delivery, including “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Get Up, Stand Up.” (Like, don’t give up the fight, if you don’t feel like it.)
The flight from Guayaquil to the Galapagos involved something we’ve never seen before: pesticide sprayed in the overhead compartments. It makes sense for visiting a relatively pristine archipelago, but they missed the luggage under our chairs. I hope nothing bad resulted.
The Cruise
When it dawned on me that passengers weren’t expected to know any Spanish, I feared that a lack of cultural immersion would dull the vacation. Foolishly, I got lazy at times that Spanish would help, since not everyone on staff knew English well. Still, I couldn’t fault anyone’s politeness, and they worked hard to keep both adults and Young Explorers (read: kids) comfortable. They even held a multi-diet (including “coles law”) Fourth of July barbecue, albeit with native salsa music. No live music until later, in the dining hall by kitchen staff.
It was the most physically active week I’ve had in a long time, with hiking, swimming, snorkeling, and kayaking -- sometimes more than one of the above before lunch. This may explain why my weight looks the same after gorging like a hobbit on sumptuous buffets (much in contrast to the airline food). My parents tell me there was even more food on their Alaska cruise years ago with another company. Well, Lindblad does seem about as environmentally conscious as they come, which would explain the many passengers my dad identified as hailing from the EPA or similar organizations.
Not that their “greenness” was impeccable. Our cabins had too much air conditioning, especially the one for me and Sarah, where simply adjusting the thermostat wasn’t enough; we had to tell the manager, who graciously fixed the problem remotely. All three water sources in the bathroom had abrupt water pressure, as by vacuum flushing, which often didn’t do the job in one go. Perhaps more disappointingly, with that and the drain arrangements, there was no good way to observe the Coriolis effect as we crossed the Equator. At least we got to see it slightly in the Southern Hemisphere with the natural formation known as Darwin’s Toilet.
Oh yeah: If you’re a Young Earth creationist, you’d be annoyed many times on this trip. The ship library (one of the few places I spent my downtime) even has a kid’s book on Darwin that openly considers a literal Genesis disproven. If that offends you, might I recommend the illustrated The Rime of the Ancient Mariner instead.
Sometimes personnel took movie cameras with them. It hadn’t occurred to me that my entire family would be included in documentaries in the making. What I saw later told me that I can look gawky even when not doing much of anything.
If you don’t have a good mental picture of the Galapagos on a map, most isles are pretty shapeless, but easily the largest, called Isabel or Albemarle (silly history), gets compared to a seahorse. Someone else suggested a golf club; I thought of a twisted music note; but more often, partly thanks to the isle directly left of it, I saw a rough impression of the United Kingdom with volcanoes galore. Maybe I’ll go with Albemarle, then. In any case, it appears to hang by a notch from the Equator itself, making it easy to figure out our present hemisphere. Dunno why a series of otherwise neat t-shirts showed the Equator much lower.
Wildlife
Let’s face it: Nobody goes to the Galapagos without intending to marvel at the fauna if not the flora (which includes few tall trees). I’d seen some in a 3D documentary ages ago, but that’s really not the same. Of course, now I had to put aside thoughts of video games where nearly every critter that moves is an enemy.
What makes it stand out from other untamed areas? Minimal invasion. Goats used to pose a major problem, but now only their sun-bleached skulls persist on the isles. The rat threat has declined as well, tho not as completely. Cats and dogs are allowed in human settlements, but strays are summarily executed for endemics’ sake.
Some species in the Galapagos have no natural enemies whatsoever; others do but still tend toward such inertia and tolerance that you’d think they were on their own vacation. Their general lack of fear for humans must have helped us not fear them, even the paper wasps that sometimes landed on us but wouldn’t sting unless swatted. That said, a white-tipped reef shark did seem to fear us and we had no emotional trouble swimming fairly near it. As far as I could tell, the most immediate threats were fire ants in one muddy patch and a blend-in stingray in shallow water, both of which we all avoided.
Our first encounter with a Galapagos sea lion, a species smaller than we’d seen at the zoo, was a sunbathing cub (the preferred term over “pup”) lying in our path and not minding our proximity, despite prior instructions to maintain a greater distance. An excellent intro, but it’s hard to say which encounter was best; their adorability never got old. We saw them almost every day, lounging and galumphing on land or swimming in the water, playful as any other aquatic mammal. One adult got pretty far from the water and blocked our staircase, but the guide spread out his poncho to look big and drive it back. They do have a habit of taking over the place, as we later saw from their presence on park benches and playground equipment. Only on one day did we meet their cousin the fur seal, which is actually a misnamed sea lion.
The most surprising thing about the sea lions was their range of noises. Once in a while we heard seal-like barking, but mostly it was something downright cacophonous, whether a cub calling for its maaa or a grown male telling us to back away. A nighttime beach full of them (about as active as by day, for what that’s worth) could provide sounds for demons in Diablo IV.
Yet what did Darwin’s companion dub “imps of darkness”? Iguanas. Ironically, at long last Mom could see these spiny reptiles as pretty cute -- when they didn’t blend in too well with the black lava, that is. Land or marine, they tended to gather in large groups, often overlapping each other in essential group hugs and not caring when smaller things like lava lizards and Sally Lightfoot crabs walked over them. Unlike the sea lions, they did become old hat after a while, just something to step around. The most interesting thing the marine specimens did was sneeze out salt from seawater, prompting me to call it “nasal NaCl.” Gave me visions of ancient Romans making trades with anthropomorphic iguanas.
One hiking party saw a snake -- not my party, alas. The other small reptiles to be found were gecko-sized species of lava lizard, predictably most likely to run at humans’ approach. Their signature moves were pushups, a gesture to assert their territory, tho a guide quipped about seasonal training.
Among big reptiles, of course, are the giant tortoises who had the courtesy to live on after Lonesome George. Aside from occasionally hissing at too-close tourists from inside their shells, the only vocal sounds they ever make are in mating. We luckily happened on such an event, which involved slow, gravelly bass grunting. Made me wonder if tortoises would appreciate the sex appeal of Barry White.
I wondered what to call so many iguanas in one place. Even the Net isn’t giving me a conventional answer, so I’ll uncertainly volunteer “a lounge.” That wouldn’t work for all the turtles we swam with, tho. One group term we did learn was “shoal,” which differs from a school in that the fish don’t all move in the same direction. I combined them to make “shul,” which my dad says is a group of gefilte fish. But when I saw numerous eagle rays swimming the same way with naval precision, I had to call them a fleet o’ rays, not to be confused with Frito Lays.
Some of the most prominent birds are ZOMG BEWBIES -- er, boobies, mostly of the blue-footed persuasion, tho some red-footed or Nazca. They get their name from looking stupid to settlers, but they actually look pretty cool when they dive fast into the water and come up with their prey already swallowed. Waddling on land, they’re mainly just cuddly, especially when the males spread their wings and whistle for the females, who oddly have much deeper voices more like moos. They do not make sounds when vibrating their throats for heat regulation, but I thought of an operatic tenor a la BBC talking animal humor.
Also prominent are frigate birds, whose males are distinguished by red pouches that look like life vests when advertising for the ladies (my office mate called them rednecks). One evening a friggin’ frigate soared persistently over a party on our stern, neither flapping nor landing for the longest time. I envied his effortless skill but worried aloud that he was looking for someone to poop on. Minutes later, he pelted Sarah. Mom then compared me to the psionic boy from The Twilight Zone.
Other birds we saw included smooth-billed anis, Galapagos hawks who hovered in place like kites on purpose, yellow warblers, mockingbirds, Darwin finches, storm petrels, shearwaters, brown pelicans, the uniquely flightless cormorants, swallow-tailed gulls, brown noddy terns, striated and great blue herons, cattle egrets, American oystercatchers, whimbrels, and… the only penguins who ever venture unassisted into the northern hemisphere. Galapagos penguins are smaller than their Antarctic brethren and all the cuter for it. When I saw a single one on a rock near where we swam, I dubbed her Guinevere. You didn’t think my penchant for punny names stopped at “Downscale,” did you?
I picked up animal checklists from the ship, but they were a little incomplete; I never learned what sort of dragonflies I kept seeing. Worse, I could identify very few aquatic creatures more precisely than “parrotfish,” “surgeonfish,” “coral,” “salema” (in pretty glinting schools), “damselfish,” “sea urchin,” and “barnacle.” We would’ve gotten more details on a glass-bottom boat ride, but the boat broke in a storm. Instead we settled for a Zodiac ride, which turned into a whale chase that I could hardly enjoy between my bad position for viewing and a sore seat from balancing in a speedboat. My only good view of a whale was of a beached and bleached skeleton, which in context could have belonged to Guanzilla.
Sarah and Mom enjoyed the occasional sight of a zigzag spider. To my slight surprise, they even thought hermit and ghost crabs were cute. The rest of the invertebrates I recall seeing were insects: sulfur butterflies, painted ladies, monarch and queen butterflies, Galapagos carpenter bees, and painted locusts who were neither very destructive nor above landing on you.
Back to Civilization
Only in the last two days of the cruise did we see towns on the isles, particularly Santa Cruz. They too honor Darwin, using the letter W more often than most Spanish-speaking areas; there’s even, in translation, a February 12th Street, noting his birthday. Sadly, lots of things were set up as tho Lonesome George were still alive. Someone should paint over the tortoise mural with the words “Follow George” at the end.
In town I bought more souvenirs than usual, supplementing the iguana postcard I got from the ship. One is a Parque Nacional Reserva Marina t-shirt; the rest are figurines of a tortoise, a blue-footed booby, and a sea lion. I later let my office mate pick one for herself; she chose the last. One item I passed over was a pencil with 3D human caricatures having sex. No, I don’t miss those in the U.S., much less the office.
Our tour of the reserve was a mixed bag. The high point to me was seeing tourists work an old-fashioned sugar press, complete with an unrefined log to spin. The disappointing part was a brief look in a lava tube with a bored guide who wouldn’t take us in far. We bought mini-flashlights for that? Oh well, they’ll come in handy someday. Mom’s battery ran out anyway.
The Guayaquil tour was the most awkward, especially when the guide led us thru a Catholic church with mass going on; we sensed that the congregation didn’t welcome it. We also encountered a massive black market that could hardly afford such blatancy in the U.S. We even passed some police talking near a motionless woman who must have been very stoned at best. I got concerned that fellow tourists took pictures of private residences without asking permission.
On the plus side, we entered a park that let us pet the land iguanas for a change, including a handheld baby. They feel kinda like skimpy basketballs, and an elder closed his eyes in possible pleasure at the petting. Some iguanas appeared to be headbanging -- not quite as impressive as the lizard pushups.
Mi Familia
For the first time that I recall, my mom and sister needed some of the free Dramamine and I didn’t. This doesn’t mean that the rocking never bothered me: On some nights I could hardly sleep for the shifting sense of balance. The noise of the engines didn’t help.
Mom developed quite a reputation as the ship’s main pianist. Several people bought her wine because of it. Sarah played slightly less but also sang a little, also to great appreciation.
But don’t get the idea that there was much nightlife. For another first time ever, my dad helped close a bar. People simply got into the habit of early to bed and early to rise, probably more from the activity schedule than from the time zone (two hours’ difference from EDT).
For much of my life, Mom would tell me not to read in the dark. I would retort that modern doctors saw no harm in it and she should be glad I saved energy. Eventually she realized I’d grown up and therefore wouldn’t change my ways. This time Sarah took up the torch (NPI), not bossily but with vocal disbelief at my threshold for resorting to a light switch. I made a point to tell Mom for her amusement.
One morning I noted that an anagram for Endeavour is “devour an E.” Mom replied, “Good morning to you too.” Oh yeah, I hadn’t said anything to her before then. That’s me for ya.
So despite my early misgivings, this was one of the best vacations of my adult life. I hope to do Lindblad again sometime, possibly in the Baja California region.
Guayaquil
Lindblad confused us by giving each traveler two paper luggage tags and two smaller plastic-coated ones, which had different styles but asked for the same info. More confusing was the airport’s use of slightly different cards to fill out. Mine said “Date of Bird.” Uh, sorry, but my love of animals extends only so far.
Wishing to learn and record as much Spanish as possible, I packed and still have two airline magazines. In the meantime, I was proud to figure out a somewhat stealthy pun on an ad in the airport. It showed a human finger with a face and tuxedo, apparently a mascot made to appear in a series. Below was written “Agente 00D2.” Cero cero de dos… dedos -- fingers!
As it happened, we spent part of 6/29 and 6/30 in rooms 629 and 630 at the Hilton Colon. (Why they skip the accent on that last word, I dunno.) It was luxurious but continued the confusion. You could not take an elevator to your floor unless you inserted your keycard in the wall adjacent to the buttons. We pushed a flashing light on our phone and got someone at the front desk who said it meant we should call a certain number for messages, but that number reported none, so we slept with the light still flashing. We were not surprised to hear English-language music in most of the hotel, but one internal restaurant played bossa nova covers of songs whose lyrics clashed with the sleepy delivery, including “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Get Up, Stand Up.” (Like, don’t give up the fight, if you don’t feel like it.)
The flight from Guayaquil to the Galapagos involved something we’ve never seen before: pesticide sprayed in the overhead compartments. It makes sense for visiting a relatively pristine archipelago, but they missed the luggage under our chairs. I hope nothing bad resulted.
The Cruise
When it dawned on me that passengers weren’t expected to know any Spanish, I feared that a lack of cultural immersion would dull the vacation. Foolishly, I got lazy at times that Spanish would help, since not everyone on staff knew English well. Still, I couldn’t fault anyone’s politeness, and they worked hard to keep both adults and Young Explorers (read: kids) comfortable. They even held a multi-diet (including “coles law”) Fourth of July barbecue, albeit with native salsa music. No live music until later, in the dining hall by kitchen staff.
It was the most physically active week I’ve had in a long time, with hiking, swimming, snorkeling, and kayaking -- sometimes more than one of the above before lunch. This may explain why my weight looks the same after gorging like a hobbit on sumptuous buffets (much in contrast to the airline food). My parents tell me there was even more food on their Alaska cruise years ago with another company. Well, Lindblad does seem about as environmentally conscious as they come, which would explain the many passengers my dad identified as hailing from the EPA or similar organizations.
Not that their “greenness” was impeccable. Our cabins had too much air conditioning, especially the one for me and Sarah, where simply adjusting the thermostat wasn’t enough; we had to tell the manager, who graciously fixed the problem remotely. All three water sources in the bathroom had abrupt water pressure, as by vacuum flushing, which often didn’t do the job in one go. Perhaps more disappointingly, with that and the drain arrangements, there was no good way to observe the Coriolis effect as we crossed the Equator. At least we got to see it slightly in the Southern Hemisphere with the natural formation known as Darwin’s Toilet.
Oh yeah: If you’re a Young Earth creationist, you’d be annoyed many times on this trip. The ship library (one of the few places I spent my downtime) even has a kid’s book on Darwin that openly considers a literal Genesis disproven. If that offends you, might I recommend the illustrated The Rime of the Ancient Mariner instead.
Sometimes personnel took movie cameras with them. It hadn’t occurred to me that my entire family would be included in documentaries in the making. What I saw later told me that I can look gawky even when not doing much of anything.
If you don’t have a good mental picture of the Galapagos on a map, most isles are pretty shapeless, but easily the largest, called Isabel or Albemarle (silly history), gets compared to a seahorse. Someone else suggested a golf club; I thought of a twisted music note; but more often, partly thanks to the isle directly left of it, I saw a rough impression of the United Kingdom with volcanoes galore. Maybe I’ll go with Albemarle, then. In any case, it appears to hang by a notch from the Equator itself, making it easy to figure out our present hemisphere. Dunno why a series of otherwise neat t-shirts showed the Equator much lower.
Wildlife
Let’s face it: Nobody goes to the Galapagos without intending to marvel at the fauna if not the flora (which includes few tall trees). I’d seen some in a 3D documentary ages ago, but that’s really not the same. Of course, now I had to put aside thoughts of video games where nearly every critter that moves is an enemy.
What makes it stand out from other untamed areas? Minimal invasion. Goats used to pose a major problem, but now only their sun-bleached skulls persist on the isles. The rat threat has declined as well, tho not as completely. Cats and dogs are allowed in human settlements, but strays are summarily executed for endemics’ sake.
Some species in the Galapagos have no natural enemies whatsoever; others do but still tend toward such inertia and tolerance that you’d think they were on their own vacation. Their general lack of fear for humans must have helped us not fear them, even the paper wasps that sometimes landed on us but wouldn’t sting unless swatted. That said, a white-tipped reef shark did seem to fear us and we had no emotional trouble swimming fairly near it. As far as I could tell, the most immediate threats were fire ants in one muddy patch and a blend-in stingray in shallow water, both of which we all avoided.
Our first encounter with a Galapagos sea lion, a species smaller than we’d seen at the zoo, was a sunbathing cub (the preferred term over “pup”) lying in our path and not minding our proximity, despite prior instructions to maintain a greater distance. An excellent intro, but it’s hard to say which encounter was best; their adorability never got old. We saw them almost every day, lounging and galumphing on land or swimming in the water, playful as any other aquatic mammal. One adult got pretty far from the water and blocked our staircase, but the guide spread out his poncho to look big and drive it back. They do have a habit of taking over the place, as we later saw from their presence on park benches and playground equipment. Only on one day did we meet their cousin the fur seal, which is actually a misnamed sea lion.
The most surprising thing about the sea lions was their range of noises. Once in a while we heard seal-like barking, but mostly it was something downright cacophonous, whether a cub calling for its maaa or a grown male telling us to back away. A nighttime beach full of them (about as active as by day, for what that’s worth) could provide sounds for demons in Diablo IV.
Yet what did Darwin’s companion dub “imps of darkness”? Iguanas. Ironically, at long last Mom could see these spiny reptiles as pretty cute -- when they didn’t blend in too well with the black lava, that is. Land or marine, they tended to gather in large groups, often overlapping each other in essential group hugs and not caring when smaller things like lava lizards and Sally Lightfoot crabs walked over them. Unlike the sea lions, they did become old hat after a while, just something to step around. The most interesting thing the marine specimens did was sneeze out salt from seawater, prompting me to call it “nasal NaCl.” Gave me visions of ancient Romans making trades with anthropomorphic iguanas.
One hiking party saw a snake -- not my party, alas. The other small reptiles to be found were gecko-sized species of lava lizard, predictably most likely to run at humans’ approach. Their signature moves were pushups, a gesture to assert their territory, tho a guide quipped about seasonal training.
Among big reptiles, of course, are the giant tortoises who had the courtesy to live on after Lonesome George. Aside from occasionally hissing at too-close tourists from inside their shells, the only vocal sounds they ever make are in mating. We luckily happened on such an event, which involved slow, gravelly bass grunting. Made me wonder if tortoises would appreciate the sex appeal of Barry White.
I wondered what to call so many iguanas in one place. Even the Net isn’t giving me a conventional answer, so I’ll uncertainly volunteer “a lounge.” That wouldn’t work for all the turtles we swam with, tho. One group term we did learn was “shoal,” which differs from a school in that the fish don’t all move in the same direction. I combined them to make “shul,” which my dad says is a group of gefilte fish. But when I saw numerous eagle rays swimming the same way with naval precision, I had to call them a fleet o’ rays, not to be confused with Frito Lays.
Some of the most prominent birds are ZOMG BEWBIES -- er, boobies, mostly of the blue-footed persuasion, tho some red-footed or Nazca. They get their name from looking stupid to settlers, but they actually look pretty cool when they dive fast into the water and come up with their prey already swallowed. Waddling on land, they’re mainly just cuddly, especially when the males spread their wings and whistle for the females, who oddly have much deeper voices more like moos. They do not make sounds when vibrating their throats for heat regulation, but I thought of an operatic tenor a la BBC talking animal humor.
Also prominent are frigate birds, whose males are distinguished by red pouches that look like life vests when advertising for the ladies (my office mate called them rednecks). One evening a friggin’ frigate soared persistently over a party on our stern, neither flapping nor landing for the longest time. I envied his effortless skill but worried aloud that he was looking for someone to poop on. Minutes later, he pelted Sarah. Mom then compared me to the psionic boy from The Twilight Zone.
Other birds we saw included smooth-billed anis, Galapagos hawks who hovered in place like kites on purpose, yellow warblers, mockingbirds, Darwin finches, storm petrels, shearwaters, brown pelicans, the uniquely flightless cormorants, swallow-tailed gulls, brown noddy terns, striated and great blue herons, cattle egrets, American oystercatchers, whimbrels, and… the only penguins who ever venture unassisted into the northern hemisphere. Galapagos penguins are smaller than their Antarctic brethren and all the cuter for it. When I saw a single one on a rock near where we swam, I dubbed her Guinevere. You didn’t think my penchant for punny names stopped at “Downscale,” did you?
I picked up animal checklists from the ship, but they were a little incomplete; I never learned what sort of dragonflies I kept seeing. Worse, I could identify very few aquatic creatures more precisely than “parrotfish,” “surgeonfish,” “coral,” “salema” (in pretty glinting schools), “damselfish,” “sea urchin,” and “barnacle.” We would’ve gotten more details on a glass-bottom boat ride, but the boat broke in a storm. Instead we settled for a Zodiac ride, which turned into a whale chase that I could hardly enjoy between my bad position for viewing and a sore seat from balancing in a speedboat. My only good view of a whale was of a beached and bleached skeleton, which in context could have belonged to Guanzilla.
Sarah and Mom enjoyed the occasional sight of a zigzag spider. To my slight surprise, they even thought hermit and ghost crabs were cute. The rest of the invertebrates I recall seeing were insects: sulfur butterflies, painted ladies, monarch and queen butterflies, Galapagos carpenter bees, and painted locusts who were neither very destructive nor above landing on you.
Back to Civilization
Only in the last two days of the cruise did we see towns on the isles, particularly Santa Cruz. They too honor Darwin, using the letter W more often than most Spanish-speaking areas; there’s even, in translation, a February 12th Street, noting his birthday. Sadly, lots of things were set up as tho Lonesome George were still alive. Someone should paint over the tortoise mural with the words “Follow George” at the end.
In town I bought more souvenirs than usual, supplementing the iguana postcard I got from the ship. One is a Parque Nacional Reserva Marina t-shirt; the rest are figurines of a tortoise, a blue-footed booby, and a sea lion. I later let my office mate pick one for herself; she chose the last. One item I passed over was a pencil with 3D human caricatures having sex. No, I don’t miss those in the U.S., much less the office.
Our tour of the reserve was a mixed bag. The high point to me was seeing tourists work an old-fashioned sugar press, complete with an unrefined log to spin. The disappointing part was a brief look in a lava tube with a bored guide who wouldn’t take us in far. We bought mini-flashlights for that? Oh well, they’ll come in handy someday. Mom’s battery ran out anyway.
The Guayaquil tour was the most awkward, especially when the guide led us thru a Catholic church with mass going on; we sensed that the congregation didn’t welcome it. We also encountered a massive black market that could hardly afford such blatancy in the U.S. We even passed some police talking near a motionless woman who must have been very stoned at best. I got concerned that fellow tourists took pictures of private residences without asking permission.
On the plus side, we entered a park that let us pet the land iguanas for a change, including a handheld baby. They feel kinda like skimpy basketballs, and an elder closed his eyes in possible pleasure at the petting. Some iguanas appeared to be headbanging -- not quite as impressive as the lizard pushups.
Mi Familia
For the first time that I recall, my mom and sister needed some of the free Dramamine and I didn’t. This doesn’t mean that the rocking never bothered me: On some nights I could hardly sleep for the shifting sense of balance. The noise of the engines didn’t help.
Mom developed quite a reputation as the ship’s main pianist. Several people bought her wine because of it. Sarah played slightly less but also sang a little, also to great appreciation.
But don’t get the idea that there was much nightlife. For another first time ever, my dad helped close a bar. People simply got into the habit of early to bed and early to rise, probably more from the activity schedule than from the time zone (two hours’ difference from EDT).
For much of my life, Mom would tell me not to read in the dark. I would retort that modern doctors saw no harm in it and she should be glad I saved energy. Eventually she realized I’d grown up and therefore wouldn’t change my ways. This time Sarah took up the torch (NPI), not bossily but with vocal disbelief at my threshold for resorting to a light switch. I made a point to tell Mom for her amusement.
One morning I noted that an anagram for Endeavour is “devour an E.” Mom replied, “Good morning to you too.” Oh yeah, I hadn’t said anything to her before then. That’s me for ya.
So despite my early misgivings, this was one of the best vacations of my adult life. I hope to do Lindblad again sometime, possibly in the Baja California region.
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