On January 5, 2016, we traveled to Ensenada, MX and boarded our home base for the next 105 days, the World Odyssey. This is Christy’s 4th time on Semester at Sea (SAS) and our family’s 3rd voyage together. Christy first sailed as a student in 1990 and subsequently we have gone as a family, including Jay’s dad, Milton, on the Fall 2009 and 2012 voyages. We love this program and can’t think of a better way to spend quality time as a family while learning about the world. This voyage will take us almost all the way around the world as we head west from Mexico to Hawaii, Japan, China, Vietnam, Myanmar, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana, Morocco and finally England. We plan to skip the ship leg between India and South Africa to see the Maldives, Dubai, Zimbabwe and Botswana. And when we arrive in Europe, we plan to take an extra month exploring a few of the Eastern European countries that we have never visited.
Tomorrow, we arrive in Japan after 18 days at sea, including a brief stop in Hawaii. Before we start sharing our experiences in the ports, we wanted to share what life is like at sea and why Christy says the ship is her favorite port.We spend half of our 105 days aboard the ship; hence we get to know her and the daily rhythms better than any of the ports we visit. The ship is a small microcosm of a University campus, with 549 students, roughly 100 faculty & staff, 150 crew, 26 kids under the age of 18, and 20 Life Long Learners (LLL). Our family falls within this last classification of LLL — meaning older adult passengers without a paid role on the ship. This is the best of all worlds since we can be “students” part of the time, attending wonderful classes and all the ship activities (and we don’t need to take the tests, usually). But we can also be more like “faculty” at times too, invited to present to students in classes and shipboard meetings, and mentoring them on a daily basis. Lastly, when we don’t want to be students or faculty, we can relax, exercise, read, meditate, play games and just enjoy life at sea.
Many of our friends ask us how we stay sane on the ship and believe we must be going crazy after 18 days at sea. We are far from bored and the days are packed with activities. Our days usually start right before sunrise with meditation, yoga or a gym workout as the sun rises over the ocean. We have seen more sunrises on this trip than we can remember. It helps that we get to set our clocks back as we head west, thereby gaining extra hours every few days at sea. After meditating, stretching, exercising and/or watching the sunrise, we have breakfast and then head off to class. We have each chosen our favorite courses and even Luke and Ryan are sitting in on some of the college courses. Today, Luke and Jay did a great job presenting to their West and the World class. Yesterday, Jay spoke in two courses about his experiences in Japan and to the whole shipboard community in the evening.
One of the greatest benefits of traveling this way is meeting highly motivated and inspirational college students. It is very rewarding to be part of their transformation as they experience incredible adventures and begin to see their world and futures in new ways. We will be updating the blog pretty regularly for the next several weeks as we will begin to move rapidly through the first three countries on our list – Japan, China and Vietnam. Please join us as we share our experience!
