Random thoughts from the sea
Between Cruises Friday, July 3, 2026; Chicago. When I last posted in mid-May, I wrote: “I’m spending the next four months on land. I’ll spend July and August in Chicago (Logan Square area), attending an Urban Sketching symposium and catching up with friends from my summers there in 2017-2019. Fortunately
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Days 128-132, 2026 Grand World Voyage Monday to Friday, May 11-15, 2026; Panama Canal and Cartagena, Colombia. Just as we seem to be racing across the Caribbean at 18 knots toward Fort Lauderdale, the time is racing by as we come to the end of this 133-day cruise (plus the
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Days 123-126, 2026 Grand World Voyage Wednesday to Saturday, May 6-9, 2026; Manzanillo and Puerto Chiapas, Mexico, and Acajutla, El Salvador. Tiny El Salvador isn’t even a blip when it comes to cruise visitors in Central America. El Salvador accounted for just 0.1 percent of total cruise ship arrivals in
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Days 116-120, 2026 Grand World Voyage Wednesday to Sunday, April 29-May 3, 2026; Seattle, San Diego and at Sea. While the days of truly grand special events during a Holland America world cruise are in the past (think a private evening at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or at the foot
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Days 111-114, 2026 Grand World Voyage Friday to Monday, April 24-27, 2026; Kodiak, Sitka and Ketchikan, Alaska. Alaska is a special place to cruise. Majestic mountains with snow-covered caps, dense evergreen forests, dozens of rocky islands and if you’re lucky, plenty of sea life, wildlife and even bald eagles. It
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Days 103-110, 2026 Grand World Voyage Friday to Thursday, April 17-23, 2026; Hakodate, Japan, and Seven Days at Sea If you placed a map of Japan over a map of the North American east coast, our six Japanese ports would stretch from Miami to Nova Scotia. Most maps — whether
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Days 100-101, 2026 Grand World Voyage Tuesday and Wednesday, April 14-15, 2026; Yokohama, Japan. They say you can’t go back again. But sometimes you can. I went back to a magical bamboo forest in Kamakura on Tuesday, and it actually lived up to my memories. A beautifully groomed forest of
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Day 99, 2026 Grand World Voyage Monday, April 13, 2026; Shimizu, Japan. If you want to learn to make sushi, why not take a master class? Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and his team guided us through the steps to make maki and nigiri. (Maki is what most of us think
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Days 96-98, 2026 Grand World Voyage Friday to Sunday, April 10-11, 2026; Nagasaki, Japan, and at Sea. Just steps from the docked Volendam I discovered a world of miniature art that, once again, challenges me to think beyond simply replicating a scene. After all, a photograph will do that. Artist
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Days 93-94, 2026 Grand World Voyage Tuesday and Wednesday, April 7-8, 2026; Naha (Okinawa) and Amami, Japan. The sound of children playing at recess told me I had arrived at my destination. Google Translate proved it. The “Amami City Obama nursery school.” While putting together a walking route in this
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