OMGosh! We did it!

from Lexi Eddings...

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

So the cautious wise ones wail.

But I shall eat mine willy-nilly--

Otherwise it might get stale.

~The Cheerful Cherub, Rebecca McCann

I am addicted to travel. Have been since I was kid, when I camped with my family all over the western US. A few years later, I was extremely lucky in my choice of husbands. The DH went into travel IT and worked for several different airlines. Using his flight benefits, we took our kids on trips we never could have afforded otherwise. 

Then my sister, a travel agent, took me with her to Nassau on a "familiarization trip" and I was hooked on cruising. I'm in love with the romance of ocean travel, the sense of wonder when stars wheel overhead, and the fantasy that I'm actually minor royalty but only the ship's crew seems to know it. When a deck is rocking beneath my feet, all's right with my world. 

Over the years, the DH & I have taken a number of cruises on several different lines--Carnival, Costa, Princess, Holland America, Norwegian, and even the now defunct American Hawaiian, and Dolphin Cruise lines. Not all cruise ships are created equal, of course, but we found reasons to enjoy all of them.  

For a while now, I've been dreaming of taking a cruise around the world--a grand voyage that balanced bucket list destinations with the luxury of long, lazy sea days. At first I dismissed it as a pipe dream, but over the last five years or so, it started to seem a bit more real. I started talking to my DH about it. He was skeptical that we could do it, but he humored me by not saying absolutely no. 

I took that as encouragement.

Then when he retired in 2015, I started thinking about it in earnest, haunting the Cruise Critic message boards and lurking on travel blogs of other world cruisers.   

I compared itineraries, the culture of the lines, and, of course, the price. Some were so far beyond the realm of possibility for us, I dismissed them out of hand. But a few looked doable. 

Maybe. 

In a few years.

I set 2021 as my target. By then, I reasoned, we just might be able to swing it. In the meantime, I continued to monitor info about world cruises. I learned we'd likely have to book the cruise 18 months in advance because they tend to sell out. (Blame it on the Boomers!) I also watched for changes in itinerary. They don't go to the same places each year.

And I was told that world cruise fares were seldom discounted at the last minute, like other cruises sometimes are. 

But hope springs eternal, and last week (on our anniversary of all things!) I saw that Princess's 2018 World Cruise fares had been quietly slashed. I mean, SLASHED! And if we opted for 94 days (LA to Ft. Lauderdale) instead of 111 (LA to LA), the savings was enough that all of a sudden, it made sense to go sooner rather than later. 

We aren't waiting till 2021 to eat our cake. On Jan. 22, 2018, we'll board the Pacific Princess in Los Angeles for the trip of a lifetime!  

Here's our itinerary. We especially wanted to visit New Zealand (yeah, we're Lord of the Rings fans!) and Australia and the Pacific Princess makes 8 stops between those 2 countries. The ports of call in the Med are also a huge draw for me. 

So now, we have 239 days till we board the Pacific Princess. There's a ton of things to do before we go (not the least of which is finishing A COLDWATER WARM HEARTS CHRISTMAS, my holiday-themed novel for Kensington Publishing!) We have to get visas, arrange for an extension on our 2017 taxes, figure out how to pack for such a long trip, set up ways to pay our bills from sea, look into vaccinations required, make sure we have enough of our prescription meds (I may need an extra suitcase for that!), decide what shore excursions we want to take, book pre-cruise air travel and hotel...the list goes ever, ever on!

Oh! And pay our fare in full by September 24th.  

If you enjoy armchair travel like I do, I invite you to hop in my pocket and go with me on this trip. If you sign up to follow by email in the right hand column above, you'll receive my posts in your inbox. Until we embark, I'll keep you up to speed on our planning and share our adventures once we board next January. 

Of course, I'm blogging about it because I'm excited and can't believe it's real yet, but I'm also doing it because I want to encourage YOU. If you have a dream, no matter what it is, no matter how undoable it may seem, keep thinking about it. Keep talking about it. Speak that dream into existence. 

I'm rooting for you!

Art in the Ozarks

from Lexi Eddings...

Yesterday, the DH and I loaded up the camper and headed for Blowing Spring Park in Bella Vista, AR. It's a lovely part of the world, heavily treed hills and rollicking streams. Think we've arrived before the mosquito season begins in earnest. And it's near Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, which we visited today. 

I promised you pictures so this blog is going to be more of a "plog" than usual. I didn't know what to expect when we first arrived. I'd heard the architecture was as much art as the collection it houses, but I sure wasn't anticipating seeing a gigantic spider first thing!

Then I noticed the title of the piece--"Maman." That's French for "mother." Wow. Someone's got mommy issues, I thought. Then I read the artist's explanation:

Ok, I decided. Perspective is everything. I made a judgment based on my own fear of anything with more than four legs. Trust art to make me rethink my assumptions and try new ideas on for size!

This blown glass piece by Seattle artist Chihuly is in the process of being installed, It's only about half reassembled. Can you imagine the packing that went into sending this piece across country? The hundreds of boxes holding the individual shards and how many hours it will take to put them back together? 

Surprisingly enough, I was allowed to take photos inside this museum as long as I turned the flash off on my camera. I didn't know that in time to take pics of the Georgia O'Keefe paintings or the portrait of George Washington with such a pained expression on his face my own teeth hurt, but I was able to capture my favorite of the day: The Reader by Mary Cassatt. She looks so cozy, and so engaged in what she's reading, all snoodled up with pillows and not a care in the world! 

This was my DH's favorite piece. He says he can almost smell the sea air and feel the salt spray! 

Outside the museum, there is a lovely, mostly level asphalt path leading to a number of art pieces set up in the forest! 

These colorful glass globes were floating in a lagoon. Chihuly says they were a big challenge to create because while a sphere is the easiest form for a glass artist to create, it's not so easy on this scale. 

 

What's American art without the quintessential American hero--a cowboy?

And you can't very well go to Arkansas without running into a razorback! 

I'm going to leave you with a snippet from my DH's journal about his take on one of the pieces we saw: 

"One of the Modern Art exhibits that I was fascinated by is in this picture.  I've always been fascinated by perception, and how experience or bias changes the way people see a situation, or how it affects their "world view" as Francis Schaeffer puts it.  

This piece gives a visual representation of that concept.

The way the glass changes the line of the architecture, affecting how we see that straight line.  The color changes light affecting our perception of the water, and the view.  This is a perfect example of how our background and or the way we think changes how we see the physical and emotional world around us.  I need to remember this when trying to deal with other people, and trying to understand why they don't see things the way I see them. 

Amen to that. 

PS. This amazing museum was built by the Walton family--the folks behind Walmart. It is free to the public and so worth the trip! What a beautiful and generous use of wealth! Really makes me want to support my local Walmart store next time I need something. 

More Turtle Travel

from Lexi Eddings...

The camper weathered the recent flood unscathed!

Our neighbors weren't happy about us having it parked by our garage (even though it could not be seen from their property!) so, in the interest of peace, we rented a fenced, off site spot to park it. At the time, I stewed about the injustice of it. I loved having the camper close by so I could store a few things in it and use the fridge as an extra place to keep colas and bottled water.  But as it turned out, it was a blessing that the camper was someplace higher and drier when the flood waters came.

Which just goes to show that "all things do work together for good," even when we're sometimes sure they don't.  I'm feeling very blessed and very grateful.

So now we're planning our next little ziptrip! Next week, we're heading for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It's the museum Walmart built near Bentonville, Arkansas. From the website, it looks like it's surrounded by a lovely forest and the Ozark hills. (The locals call them mountains, but I've lived near the Rockies, the Big Horns, the Wasatch and the Cascades. The bumps around here are hills.) We're looking forward to a quick getaway in our tiny house.

With any luck, I'll have typed THE END on my current Work-In-Progress by then and this can be a real vaca. I promise lots of pics!

Shirley Evans Said It Best

from Lexi Eddings...

A Coldwater Warm Hearts Wedding starts with a quote from Shirley Evans, who's just learned she has breast cancer:

Trouble makes us stronger, they say. It brings out the best in us and shows what we're really made of. But don't you just hate it when blessings come in disguise?

A disguised blessing came to the Ozarks last week. Our little town was drenched with 13 1/2 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Previous flood records were blown away. (See my previous post for pics taken from our house that'll make your hair stand on end!) People who'd been assured their properties were not in a flood plain found themselves with five feet of water in the second story of their homes. The highways leading into and out of town were shut down. Gas stations ran out of fuel. Grocery store shelves started looking a little thin. Now, even a week out from the worst of it, I'm having trouble refilling a prescription.

But there is a silver lining behind this storm. Despite the damage done, no one died in our part of the Ozarks. And even during the worst of the storm, our community came together. First responders were out risking their lives to do water rescues. Three of our friends spent a terrifying night on the roof of their home near the river before they were saved by emergency crews in a boat. Once the rain stopped, county linemen were in our neighborhood, retrieving an electrical box that had been torn from its foundation by the rushing water. Power was restored promptly. Neighbor began helping neighbor with clean up. Our church has opened its doors as an emergency shelter for those whose homes have become uninhabitable or lost entirely. Work crews are being organized and supplies distributed to those who are in need.

We lived on the edge of Boston during the nightmare of the 2013 Marathon bombing. The city pulled together. We sheltered in place while our law enforcement did their jobs and brought the perpetrators to justice. Lives were lost or changed forever. A beautiful young couple in our neighborhood both lost limbs, but the community rallied around them. We were Boston Strong.

Now we're feeling Ozark Strong. Our little town has had, to borrow from Tolkien, a chance to show its quality. And it's pretty darn good.

Have you ever lived through a "blessing in disguise" that made you stronger? Wiser? More tenderhearted?