It’s spring! The cruise ships are arriving!

Every year about this time the cruise lines start moving their ships from their winter ports to their summer ports. This is the season of Panama Canal cruises and coastal cruises, as there is no point in moving empty ships from the Caribbean to Seattle! For those of us overlooking the waters of western Washington, the first sight of a cruise ship moving through the strait is a sure sign that spring has finally arrived.

My small town has a beautiful deep harbor. Every year or so one or more of these transitional cruises will include a stop here. Passengers have the opportunity to disembark, stroll through downtown, and enjoy the shops and restaurants. For the more adventurous, there is the option of taking an excursion tour to our mountains, rain forests, and rocky beaches.

Yesterday Holland America’s ms Oosterdam came to town. As it happens, this is an identical sister ship to the Westerdam, on which I’ll be cruising to Alaska at the end of July as a participant in the Great Alaskan Marathon. This is a staged marathon, meaning that we’ll run four races adding up to 26.2 miles during the week of the cruise. I’m excited about the opportunity to see Alaska, run on spectactular trails and through quaint (and steep) downtown streets, and mingle with a bunch of other runners for a whole week.

Yesterday, actually seeing a ship just like the one I’ll be on really ramped up my enthusiasm! I headed downtown for as close a look as possible. Security was rather tight at the dock, so I drove out to the hook (the natural sand spit that frames the harbor) for a panoramic view of the ship and the downtown area. It dwarfed my downtown!

The smaller ship you see on the far left is the ferry that takes cars and people from here to Victoria BC. That ferry is 341 feet long and carries 110 vehicles plus 1,000 passengers. The Oosterdam is 936 feet long and carries 1,916 passengers, 817 crew members, and all the restaurants, theatres, casinos, sport courts, swimming pools, and other assorted accoutrements that make up the cruising experience.

The large tan building just to the right of the Oosterdam belongs to a company that builds “super-yachts.” The largest model, built here in my town, is 163 feet and generally includes a heliport. Picture a 163-foot yacht emerging from that building — it’s huge! But it would look like a dingy next to the Oosterdam.

Back at my house later I could just see the Oosterdam from my bedroom window, but I had a panoramic view of it when it departed at 11:00 PM and glided out of the harbor, all lit up like a multi-layer birthday cake. Cruising season has begun! Later this summer, finally, I won’t be one of those watching from shore when my ship moves through the strait en route to Alaska.

Meanwhile, I continue to keep moving, adding bike rides and hikes to my 3-day-a-week running schedule. I’m getting some form of real-world exercise just about every day, which is why I’m blogging less even though I theoretically have more time in my post-corporate day. I’m still wobbly on the bicycle, but on my hikes (encouraged and accompanied by new friends) I’ve successfully met the challenges of steep hills and small stream crossings. I’m going to have to invest in rain gear, however, as I don’t much enjoy getting wet and cold.

In past years I would have retreated to my treadmill on anything less than a “perfect” sunny day, but I’m finally learning that life is too short to wait for a “perfect” day. So tonight is beer running night, and whatever the weather, I’ll meet running friends for a short run along the waterfront followed by wonderful locally-brewed beer.

Rain? Wind? Mud? Bring it on! I am a Pacific Northwesterner by choice, and this is my home.

25 years behind me — and what lies ahead

First, I want to thank everyone in what I fondly call my vast global audience, for your comments, suggestions, and supportive vibes as I contemplated and then lived through what should have been my 25th wedding anniversary in the absence of the other party to that anniversary. It was a very weird day, but thanks to you it was a good day in an odd sort of way.

I really can’t tell you how much your good thoughts lifted my spirits today. Thank you yet again.

I got a wide variety of suggestions ranging from (and I’m exaggerating a bit now) “go to bed and pull the covers over your head” to “go out and party hearty with champagne and loud music.” The applied social scientist in me suspects that each one of those suggestions was a projection of the personality of the person making the suggestion. I would have done the same thing if you had asked me what to do about your situation.

As I lean well toward the introverted end of the scale, my solution was to develop a headache by mid-afternoon and sneak off to take a nap in my favorite chair — almost but not quite pulling covers over my head. When I woke up I felt better, so I set about making myself some comfort food — homemade mushroom-cheese soup accompanied by local organic rye bread and a couple of glasses from a very nice bottle of local wine that I’d put away a couple of years ago. Except for the wine (Kurt stopped drinking years ago) this was a meal that Kurt would have loved. He didn’t always rave about my cooking. I’m a vegetarian, he wasn’t, so we often ate separately — which is one reason why we ate out so much. But he never failed to love my vegetable-cheese soups, no matter what the vegetable was. My only problem with today’s lovely meal was that I didn’t make enough (no leftovers!) and I used a little too much cheese (but Kurt would have loved the gummy cheeseballs that formed).

Then I decided what I want to do for a vacation next year. I guess it was those comments about “think about what you and he loved doing together” that made my decision not only possible but necessary today.

I want to do a running-related vacation, and I’d been thinking very seriously about doing the Marathon di Tuscany: a staged marathon in which participants run 26.2 miles over the course of several days in several locations in Italy. It sounded perfect — run, eat, and drink under the Tuscan sun. But I’ve been concerned about developing socio-economic-political disruptions in Europe (and globally). The promoters kept promising to open registration soon, but kept inexplicably delaying.

So today I was thinking about what sort of vacation would have worked for both Kurt and me. It was hard to imagine him getting excited about going with me to Italy, as he hated to fly, and we’d also agreed that our first trip to Europe would include a visit to the Porsche factory and museum in Stuttgart.

Then it struck me — the same promoters also lead an Alaskan running cruise.

Living where we do, Kurt and I watched Alaska cruise ships pass by every summer and promised ourselves that we’d do that some year. We were so close to going in 2009 that I actually mentioned our plans in the acknowledgements section of my dissertation — “now it’s finally time to take that Alaska cruise.” But think back, if you will, to the economic conditions of late 2008 and early 2009. It was not an auspicious time to commit several thousand dollars to a dream vacation. So we didn’t go.

Well, now I’m registered for the Great Alaskan Marathon Cruise on July 28 through August 4, 2012. Economic conditions are no better, but what the hell! At least this trip is largely domestic (we do stop in Victoria BC on our last afternoon, from which, weather permitting, I can see my home town across the strait). Thanks to tour organizers “the Penguin” John Bingham and his wife Coach Jenny Hadfield, I’ll be running in places like Juneau, Sitka, and Ketchikan, seeing glaciers up close (before they’re gone), and hopefully seeing lots of my beloved orcas and humpbacks as well. I’ll have to learn to run trails (yikes) and some major hills (big yikes!), as well as develop the resilience to run, walk, or crawl 26.2 miles (in four stages) under a variety of less-than-ideal conditions. The photos from the 2011 cruise show rain, BIG swells during the on-board deck race, and a really scary-looking flight of stairs in (I believe) Ketchikan. They also show lots of mega-smiles and some absolutely gorgeous scenery.

Besides all that stuff, it’s also a cruise, of course, and I smile now as I imagine Kurt doing all the things we dreamed about and putting up with the things I want to do: at the buffet line eschewing all that healthy runner food, relaxing in a deck chair or at the movie theatre, and cheering me on at the finish of four totally amazing races. I so wish he could have been there, but he won’t be. My life will go on.

Happy Anniversary, Kurt! Today was a good day — you would have liked it.