🎵 Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby… 🎶 After 34 days of very smooth sailing, we finally got a bit of ‘ocean motion’ - and if you got that movie reference, congrats. It’s pretty obscure. It’s how Annie Potts described sex on a waterbed to Mark Hamill in a trash 1978 movie called Corvette Summer.

And when I say we’re rocking, I don’t mean seasickness-inducing rocking, but just enough to make everyone walk like they’re drunk. I took pics of the high and low points on the waves and you can see the horizon doesn’t move that much. Here’s the high point (notice where the horizon is compared to the ship)

Here’s the low point.

With very little side-to-side action, you don’t really notice the motion much unless you’re walking around - or sitting by the pool, watching the water slosh. It’s been a remarkably smooth-sailing holiday, considering how often we were out in open ocean.

Fun afternoon - one last choir rehearsal at 10am this morning, then we got to perform for the ship in the sendoff party for the 112 of us getting off the ship day after tomorrow. The choir did pretty well, actually, to the surprise of pretty much everyone in the choir. Performance adrenaline, maybe, but we sounded better today than we ever did in rehearsals. If you’re going to peak, the performance day is the day to do it!
We sang “The Wellerman” (a sea shanty) by ourselves and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” with ukulele accompaniment. (Thanks to Aussie mate Heather for the photo.)

The show closed with the Viking Vocalists singing a nice rendition of “Stand by Me” and the cruise director singing “Imagine”. I was a little bit of a mess.

I should explain for the folks reading this who don’t know me that well. I have stage IV lymphoma and I’m in the middle of fighting metastatic prostate cancer. There’s a seismic shift in your mental state when a doctor tells you that you have a 30% chance of surviving for five years. I went through a month of radiation, counselling, and doctor visits, and I’m on a new drug cocktail of meds that pushed those odds to 70% (cost to me: $0. Thanks, Canadian healthcare!), but the shift in the psyche doesn’t change with the meds. Even with the better odds, that ‘what if this goodbye is the last?’ feeling is like a punch in the gut. What does change, however, is the hormone balance. The psyche shift plus meds that alter the hormones equals me being brought to tears by even the smallest things. And goodbyes? Brutal. They’re almost too much to handle.
So the farewell celebration today was both fun and emotionally difficult. I cried a lot. Even though I’m positive about the outcome with the meds, my mind has forever been altered to believe that every goodbye might be the last.

And even if I live a long time, there are new friends and other folks I’ve met on the cruise that I’m going to miss, not the least of which are my choir buddies. The photo is when we were all attempting to sit down on the stairs while the boat was rocking(!)

There was a farewell party at the LGBTQ gathering for our favourite bar server Suta tonight as well. He’s been awesome and we gave him a nice card signed by the group and some money. He’s going to donate 10% of the money to help orphans in Bali, his home country. He’s a nice guy. More tears.

Afterwards, there was a big steak to-do around the pool, but we skipped it in favour of the sushi bar.

The evening show was Anelisa Lamosa, a South African / British singer who came with songs by Aretha Franklin, Adele, Chaka Khan, and some Xhosa traditional songs. She was excellent, but I was unfamiliar with much of the music.

She mentioned that she had played in The Lion King and I tried to figure out which role she’d have played. The first thought was Nala, because she would’ve done a great job of “Shadowland”, but eventually I decided that it had to be Rafiki. She’d be perfect for that role.

Looked it up after the show: yep!
And that’s it for tonight. We land in one of my all-time favourite cities tomorrow and I’m super-excited.

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