John: We're home--back in the US, and, as I write, back in our house in Charlottesville. The Explorer arrived in San Diego at about eight am on Wednesday morning, May 2, greeted by hundreds of parents lining the pier on both sides of the cruise terminal. For the parents who had been waiting since an early hour, it must have been an exciting thing to see the ship, which they last glimpsed departing the Bahamas, coming over the horizon, having gone more than 25,000 miles since January. For us, it was a morning of mixed emotions: we're excited to be home but it's also sad to be leaving a ship that has come to feel like another home over the last three and a half months, and also all the people we have come to know in that time. In a lot of ways, Semester at Sea is a crazy thing--why in the world would anyone think it was a good idea to put 600 college students on a cruise ship and send them around the world? But it's also an incredibly intense experience, unlike anything we have ever done before. Every place we have seen has been interesting and incredible in its own way, and we've gone to places that we would never have imagined seeing; I suppose it is conceivable that we might have gone to Japan, China, or South Africa, but the odds of our ever visiting Accra, Saigon, Mauritius, or Cochin are long indeed, and we're deeply grateful for the chance to have gone to these places. And the business of doing it on a ship with a whole community that's been assembled for the purpose is comparable to nothing else I can think of, and you kind of have to have gone through it to understand it fully. Which is something that you come to realize in the final days, and that makes even the annoying people on board (of which there were not too many, actually) gain a sheen of sentimental association, since you have shared a unique experience with them. Aidan has made good friends here, and Maeve was called by more than one person the "star' of the voyage--she has gained a lot of new fans.
So there were lot of teary faces as we got off the ship in something of a mad rush once the ship was cleared to let passengers disembark. Various sectors of the shipboard community were called in sequence; we hugged the line up of deans and residence advisors assembled at the gangway; we assembled all our luggage--an enormous pile, but smaller than some others (we've generally come to realize that we can live without a lot of the stuff we have gotten used to having)--and piled into cabs to go to our downtown hotel. We decided to stay in San Diego for a couple of days before making the full re-entry home.
Surely the highlight of our time in San Diego was going to Legoland, which is kind of wonderful and bizarre. What's nice is that unlike other amusement parks, it doesn't have scary thrill rides; it sort of builds rides out of the various categories of Legos that have become a big part of our lives the last few years. And it has hands-down the best food of any theme park I've ever visited; fresh pints of strawberries on offer, for example, which we ate up greedily, having not seen a berry of any kind since January.
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| Aidan in Lego car; Maeve at Lego New York |
And so Semester at Sea is over. It has been a great and rich experience, one that we will be chewing on for a long time. We can readily see why some people have gotten a little addicted to it and have done it over and over again; Bob Viera, the executive dean on this voyage, has now done the round-the-world trip five times, and many other people on this voyage were repeaters as well. For the moment, we're staying put, and hope not to bore people too much with our stories. If anyone is interested in doing SaS, we'd be glad to fill in the gaps, and it's worth noting that there are lots of people going on the voyage who are neither students nor teaching faculty. The program in effect creates an entire small college every semester, and for that, they need residence life directors, librarians, people to staff the field office (which puts together the off-ship trips), administrative staff--even a communications person, a videographer, and a photographer. Children travel at an incredibly cheap rate (because she did not turn three until five days after the end of the voyage, Maeve traveled for free). Maybe we, too, will have to do this again.
And with the end of the voyage, so too the end of this blog. It's been interesting, and fun! I won't miss trying to upload pictures on the incredibly slow and frustrating internet connection on the ship, but I'm happy for the chance to document the voyage this way. The blog got close to 2500 hits in the last three and a half months, and while I know that some of those were accidental (we were getting hits from Russia for a while--I'm guessing from an automated site of some kind that was probably up to no good), I'm gratified by the attention. Many thanks to all the readers, and commenters, wherever you are.
