So very near to the end of the road.
There’s a moment at the end of the first Harry Potter movie, when Hermione looks at Harry as they get off the train and comments that it feels strange to be going home. Harry’s response is to look back at the train and say “I’m not going home, not really”
Am I going home in 16 days? I don’t know. I’m going back to Victoria, back to my family, back to my friends, back to “normal” for a few weeks, I know that much. But in a very real sense I’m leaving home as well. Every time you leave a ship it feels like leaving home, leaving one family for another. Though in this case I’m not nearly as close to my team as I have been in the past, and there are multitudes of reasons why my shore-side home holds a welcome retreat from the intrigues, politics and out-and-out bizarreness of life on the flagship this time around. Not too long ago I very much bought into all the drama that went on around me, but as of late I have more than enough of my own to be concerned about.
From here on in we’re in straight port days until the Transatlantic, which is looming in front of us like some massive unbreachable wall. It’s hard to explain the final push that is the transatlantic: seven straight sea days when the guests are at their most fragile and the crew is – often as not – at our wits end. Everyone is tired, everyone is frazzled and, as the British so aptly put it – utterly shattered.
We go into this heads down and nose to the grindstone, because this week – whether we like it or not, is the week that really really counts as far as the final ratings go. This is where we remind the guests where they’ve been and what they’ve done and what we’ve given them, because most memories run short – it’s difficult to remember where we were in January. Easter Island seems years ago, so does the vast frozen expanse of Antarctica…the only port that I remember with total clarity from the earlier days of the cruise is Tahiti, and that’s for reasons that no one but me would even care about let alone understand.
Only one more formal night after this evening, and that will be one that tops all the others: the Grand Black & Gold Masquerade. The outfit for which has been hanging untouched in my tiny cabin wardrobe since December. That night will mark the second to last day of the cruise – and it now lies only two short weeks away.