Random thoughts from the sea
Day 18, Grand Asia 2018 Thursday, Oct. 18, 2018, Shimizu, Japan: I’ll start at the end. Leaving Shimizu was our best sail away ever. A large crowd gathered on the pier and for at least 15 minutes elementary-school children entertained us with song and dance. It was a like halftime
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Day 17, Grand Asia 2018 Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018, Yokohama, Japan: I liked the nearby town of Kamakura so much last year that I signed up for a tour to go back. It’s a nice alternative to the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and is less than an hour from
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Day 16, Grand Asia 2018 Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018, Yokohama, Japan: I had debated about whether to take a tour to Tokyo today. My strongest memories of last year’s visit there are of rain. I felt like somehow I had missed seeing the Tokyo I expected to see. But the
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Day 14, Grand Asia 2018 Sunday, Oct. 14, 2018, Kushiro, Japan: For the second year in a row, the fog escorted us into Kushiro. It isn’t known as “the town of mist” for no reason. As we neared the port, a fog bank hung just off the balcony. From the
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Day 11, Grand Asia 2018 Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia: If Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are perfect pictures of snowy mountains and rugged coastlines, Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula is similarly beautiful. Perhaps their breath-taking beauty is no surprise. Both are along the edges of tectonic plates of the earth, the northern
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Day 10, Grand Asia 2018 Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018, At Sea: I went to bed Monday night and woke up on Wednesday. No, I wasn’t exhausted from being pampered by the wonderful Holland America staff. We crossed the International Date Line during the night. (I may have written about this
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Day 9, Grand Asia 2018 Monday, Oct. 8, 2018, At Sea: Many of my friends think the many sea days on a long cruise would be a showstopper. What will you do just sitting there on a ship all day? Our day ashore in Dutch Harbor last week interrupted a
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Day 7, Grand Asia 2018 Saturday, Oct. 6, 2018, Dutch Harbor, Alaska: Rugged mountains, eagles and whales – Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska delivered it all. The day started out with questionable weather as the predicted rain came in late morning. The lines for the three school
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Day 6, Grand Asia 2018 Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018, At Sea: I woke up this morning to the rocking and rolling of the ship. Capt. Fred Eversen warned us of 10-foot-plus seas. By early afternoon yesterday my wine tasting in the Crows Nest (high in the front of the ship)
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Day 4, Grand Asia 2018 Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018, At Sea: There is a danger in taking the same cruise for the second time. It is tempting to compare everything to last year. The first time I had no concrete expectations. Everything was fresh and new – “golden,” as Ponyboy
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