If you don’t know you can’t pick yourself up by the scruff of the neck and hold yourself at arm’s length maybe you can – Polgara The Sorceress, David Eddings
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that there was a time when I didn’t live on the flagship. When the World Cruise was something I knew absolutely nothing about. My very first contract, what seems like a very long time ago Toffy – who was my EM at the time, long before she became my shore-side supervisor – called me into her office to figure out what contract I wanted to do next.
Well, I heard that there was this cruise that went around the world, that’d be cool…someday.
Of course they can’t jump you from a seven day Alaska run to a 114 global circumnavigation; you have to prove yourself first, which I didn’t know at the time. I wasn’t trying to ask for the top, because I didn’t know it was the top. It just sounded interesting.
And four seasons later, here I am.
With really no idea how I got here, how I ended up with so much responsibility on what has always felt like rather a frail pair of shoulders, and how I ended up with…a career? I’ve never stuck with a job this long in my life. Except dancing, and that’s never been a career, merely a passion that I hoped would one day lead to a career, that I still hope someday might.
But, for now, well? Here I stand, and here I’ll stay…
With Grand Cayman behind us, there’s now nothing left in front of us except one more sea day and then the turnaround chaos of Florida. Already the ship is starting to show signs of the change-over. This afternoon, 51 Christmas trees were bundled up and rolled away to be prepared for offloading in our final port, from there they will go into storage to be tidied and redecorated for next season. The giant nutcrackers that have graced the atrium doorway on the lower level have been dismantled and packed away and the last of the artificial snow that we so carefully sprinkled down from the balconies at the beginning of the cruise has been swept away. Orchids have replaced the poinsettias in the buffet restaurant and the background music program hasn’t played a Christmas carol in the last 48 hours.
A lot of people don’t realize that there is no turn-around time between these journeys of ours. Once we reach Florida, everyone will fall into their respective roles, working like a well-oiled multi-cogged clock until everything that needs to be accomplished, we’ll shuffle through immigration, run the drills we need to run, drop crew off, pick crew up and we’ll debark one manifest’s worth of passengers and pick up another very different one…
And then, within hours, we’ll sound those three long blasts on the ship’s whistle, and disappear over the horizon again…
Four seasons…and I never thought I’d make it one…
Just goes to show how life can surprise you sometimes.