The Bucket Book

Pulse-quickening

...that's what they ought to call this brochure.  It arrived yesterday.  It is fat (113 pages), glossy, and  expensively produced.  I flipped through it in the late afternoon when my blood sugar was a little low and I was dragging, but soon my pulse had quickened and I felt a yearning so strong that I couldn't understand why other people (Jerry, for example) didn't also feel they have to drop everything and go to Zanzibar.  Seriously.

Even though it was only last April/May that we took a cruise on this very cruise line, when we spent thousands of dollars to ride around the boot of Italy,  when we disembarked in Venice swearing we'd never, ever take another cruise.  In fact, I said they couldn't PAY me to take a cruise.

Now this.

By the time Jerry got home, I was buoyed by possibilities.  How could anyone die without having been to St. Petersburg?  Ireland? Hong Kong? Not so much Mumbai or Greenland, perhaps,  but Mont Saint-Michel?  How could anybody face the possibility of an ICU and tubes and monitors, without memories of seeing the Colosseum and Red Square and Cape Town? 

I ran this by him.  Not impressed. I could persuade him to go to Costa Rica, possibly the Panama Canal (again, the ship) and Alaska.  No interest at all in sailing down the Volga from St. Petersburg to Moscow.  Unmoved.  Would rather join the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

But me?  Again, as I was a year ago,  I was seduced by the brochure:  all your needs taken care of, a floating hotel, room service, delicious food, nannying. 

And then I remembered:  On a ship, you're in port only so many hours.  You live by the ship's schedule, not your own, even if the slogan of this cruise line is "Your world, your way."  We had only five hours in Florence.  You take a chance on being on a reunion cruise of Texas A&M and Auburn alums who talked loudly and seriously about Newt Gingrich.   Among your fellow passengers is a woman who turns up her nose at your borrowing the stewardess's vacuum cleaner to clean Boboli Garden dust off your shoes.  Alas, it all sounds so good.  LOOKS so good.

Here's Zanzibar.  (Maybe I should just make a quilt with these colors?)

Is anyone else seduced?