The Eclipse Cruise That Became Something More

We booked this cruise for one reason.

The eclipse.

The itinerary almost didn't matter.

We'd already spent weeks traveling through Morocco and Portugal, followed by London and Heckfield Place. We'd been to Lisbon only days earlier. We'd visited Cádiz before. A Coruña and Vigo weren't places we'd been particularly interested in seeing.

The Borealis was transportation to the path of totality.

Or at least that's what we thought.

By the time we disembarked ten days later, the eclipse was everything we'd hoped it would be.

But it wasn't the only thing that mattered.

Boarding the Borealis

Our first reaction wasn't particularly promising.

We arrived in Southampton, checked in easily, boarded the ship and looked around.

Eh.

Shirley mentioned that she liked the Haven on Norwegian.

I think we'd become spoiled.

We'd just left Heckfield Place, where we'd fallen into a rhythm of beautiful surroundings, wonderful meals, long breakfasts, walks, tea and cake. The Borealis felt very different.

So different that one of our first activities onboard was doing three loads of laundry.

At dinner, everyone with a 6:00 seating seemed to arrive at the dining room doors simultaneously.

I told Shirley it felt like being back in the military.

Dinner was good, but it was hard not to compare it to the meals we'd just had at Heckfield Place. And at 7:45, we needed to leave so the dining room could be reset for the 8:00 seating.

Different.

That became something I found myself thinking about.

Not everything needed to be compared with what came immediately before it.

This wasn't Heckfield Place.

It wasn't supposed to be.

Things didn't need to be perfect to be really good.

The next evening was formal night.

There were a lot of older men in tuxedos.

I wondered how one packs for months of world travel and includes a tuxedo. Perhaps the answer is simply a bigger suitcase.

The canapés weren't great.

The band was fine.

And we were enjoying ourselves.

At one point the band started playing the Carpenters' Top of the World, and Shirley and I sang along with the chorus.

Somewhere between the laundry, the fixed dinner seating, the tuxedos and the Carpenters, we were settling in.

Tomorrow was A Coruña.

And the eclipse.

A Coruña — And the Reason We Came

We took an organized excursion in A Coruña.

It was interesting, but one of the clearest conclusions of the day was that next time we wouldn't need one.

A Coruña was lovely.

Restaurants spilled onto the streets. The city felt approachable and easy to explore. We could have simply gotten off the ship, started walking, stopped when something interested us, found some food and eventually wandered back.

That realization would become important over the next several days.

But that wasn't why we were in A Coruña.

That evening, the ship served a barbecue dinner on deck.

Then we waited.

I had spent a fair amount of time preparing for the eclipse. I had solar glasses and filter material for my Pixel. I'd experimented with ways to cover the phone's lenses. I'd thought about where to stand and how to photograph it.

For the first 55 minutes or so, taking pictures of the eclipse was a little like watching paint dry.

Then everything changed.

The light began to dim.

The shadows changed.

The final minutes accelerated.

The ring appeared.

And then totality.

It was beautiful.

Nothing like it.

And impossibly fast.

For a few moments, the sun was simply gone.

Then the ring appeared again.

And suddenly it was light.

I'd worried about getting good photographs.

In the end, I'm glad I mostly watched.

The photographs are wonderful to have. But they don't come close to the experience of standing on the deck beside Shirley and watching daylight disappear.

A genuine bucket-list experience.

And the reason we'd booked the cruise.

The next morning, we went to Vigo.

Vigo, Pontevedra and a Thursday

We took an excursion to nearby Pontevedra.

There were pilgrims everywhere, many of them young, carrying backpacks and walking the Portuguese Way of the Camino de Santiago.

For a little while, we walked it too.

Seeing so many young people out walking made me think of Laura and the traveling she hopes to do.

And Shirley and I began talking about returning ourselves.

Maybe we'd walk part of the Camino.

We returned to Vigo with a few hours before we needed to be back aboard the ship.

Instead of returning immediately, we started walking.

We found a little restaurant called Stefany Taperia and sat outside.

Shirley looked at the menu.

"Let's order the octopus."

Apparently this is who she is now.

We ordered Galician octopus, prawns with garlic and bread.

I had a local beer.

Shirley ordered Albariño.

She took a sip.

"Niiiiice."

Then she laughed.

Somewhere along the way, nice—or more accurately, niiiiice—had become Shirley's understated way of saying something was considerably better than nice.

While we were eating, our financial advisor, John, emailed.

He'd seen photographs of the eclipse and knew we'd traveled to see it. He was thinking about us and hoped we were having a good time.

I sent him a few photographs.

Maybe, I told him, we were having too much of a good time.

Yesterday we'd watched a total solar eclipse.

That morning we'd walked a little of the Camino.

Now we were sitting outside in Vigo eating octopus and prawns.

Then the bill arrived.

€57.

Shirley's Albariño was €2.80 a glass.

She looked at me.

"We can't live here."

We laughed.

The eclipse had been extraordinary.

But sitting there in Vigo, I couldn't help thinking about the Talking Heads line:

How did I get here?

This was Thursday.

An ordinary Thursday.

And somehow this was what an ordinary day looked like now.

Learning How We Like to Travel

The next day was a sea day.

We slept late.

We relaxed.

I wrote.

I realized again how much I enjoy simply being at sea.

Then Cádiz.

We'd visited before, but this time was completely different.

Instead of taking an organized excursion out of town, we stayed in Cádiz.

We took a hop-on hop-off bus around the city to get our bearings, got off and essentially walked around the entire town.

It was crowded.

It was Saturday.

And it was nice.

I wasn't hungry, but I wanted to taste something local, so we stopped for lunch. I ordered the plate of the day: black rice with squid, braised pork, bread and a beer.

Shirley had white wine.

The meal was uninspiring.

The wine was fine.

Definitely not niiiiice.

You win some, you lose some.

It was still a good day.

And somewhere during our walk I had another realization that probably should have occurred to me long ago.

Almost everywhere we visit has history.

Cádiz has been an important port since the Phoenicians. Roman history is scattered throughout the city. Columbus sailed from here on his second voyage to the Americas.

You can walk past all of it and simply see old buildings and stones.

Or stop for a moment and think about how many people have walked the same ground before you.

We were getting better at stopping.

Back to Lisbon

Sailing into the Tagus felt completely different from arriving somewhere new.

We'd left Lisbon only a couple of weeks earlier.

Now we recognized it.

As we sailed in, I found myself naming places we'd visited.

The city felt familiar.

That was a new feeling too.

We got off the ship and headed straight for the Metro.

We still had our Metro cards from our previous visit.

We knew how to use them.

We went to the mall because Shirley needed some beauty products.

We stopped at Starbucks for iced tea.

We bought hydration mix at the market.

It's almost like we know what we're doing.

Then we visited the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Jardim da Estrela and Mercado de Campo de Ourique.

The next day we did something even better.

Almost nothing was planned.

We got off the ship around 11:30 and made our way to Miradouro das Portas do Sol.

While we were walking, Shirley saw a tram stopping.

She'd wanted to ride one.

So we got on.

We had no idea where it was going.

We didn't particularly care.

By blind luck, it dropped us near Avenida da Liberdade and the Starbucks we'd frequented during our previous stay.

So we stopped for iced tea.

Then we remembered that Laura's hostel was nearby.

We looked it up.

About 400 feet away.

We found it and saw the doorway Laura would walk through when she arrived in Lisbon the following month.

Same doorway.

Different journey.

Then we looked up and saw an old fortress wall.

We checked the map.

Castelo de São Jorge.

About a 25-minute walk.

Uphill.

Why not?

On the way, we passed a barber shop advertising beard trims.

I needed one.

So we stopped.

Then we continued uphill to the castle.

I'm glad we did.

From the top we could look across the city and the Tagus, see the bridge, see our ship, and seemingly see all of Lisbon.

No guide.

No itinerary.

A tram we hadn't planned to take.

A Starbucks we already knew.

Our daughter's future hostel.

An impromptu beard trim.

A castle we hadn't intended to visit.

An ordinary Monday.

A very good one.

The Ship We Weren't Sure About

Something else happened while all of this was going on.

We started liking the Borealis.

Maybe more than liking it.

We got to know the people at our dinner table.

We developed routines.

We had lazy sea days.

We dressed for formal evenings.

On the second formal night, I had to Google how to tie a Half Windsor knot.

It had been that long since I'd worn a tie.

Shirley bought a casual outfit from the ship's store and wore it one day.

She looked great.

And I got that grin again.

It was a look—and a level of comfort—that I couldn't imagine her choosing years ago.

She'd already stopped doing her hair and makeup every day.

She'd been walking around England in hiking shoes.

Now this.

A different Shirley.

Or perhaps increasingly just Shirley.

That evening, our dinner companions encouraged us to go to the Crew Show.

We probably wouldn't have gone otherwise.

I'm glad we did.

It was better than the professional entertainment.

I'm not sure I can fully explain why.

The crew members were singing and dancing not because performing was their job, but because it was something they wanted to do. There was something joyful about watching people share something that mattered to them.

Then the Enginemen came out.

Their dance was mildly provocative.

The crowd started hooping and hollering.

Shirley had been an Engineman in the Navy.

"Go Enginemen!"

Apparently formal-night Shirley and Navy Engineman Shirley can coexist quite comfortably.

On our final sea day, we slept late.

We picked up the photographs we'd purchased.

We packed.

And I found myself sad that we were leaving.

That surprised me.

Ten days earlier we'd boarded the ship feeling decidedly ambivalent.

Eh.

Now we didn't particularly want to leave.

Packing still stressed Shirley out.

She said perhaps it was because she'd fully unpacked and settled in.

That made sense.

We'd changed hotels roughly thirteen times already on this trip.

But we'd been on the Borealis long enough that, for a little while, it had become home.

The night before, during my mastermind call, John had asked me how I felt about all the transitions.

I've been thinking about that.

It's often sad to leave.

Maui.

Hermanus.

Lagos.

Heckfield Place.

And now, unexpectedly, the Borealis.

But then we move on.

And so far, what comes next has been pretty spectacular too.

This morning we disembarked in Southampton.

Our driver was waiting.

Next stop: Broadway and the Cotswolds.

Another transition.

Another place.

We boarded the Borealis for an eclipse.

And we got one.

A spectacular one.

But we also walked a little of the Camino.

We discovered Vigo.

We wandered around Cádiz.

We returned to Lisbon and realized it was beginning to feel familiar.

We learned that we increasingly prefer exploring some places on our own rather than being shown what we're supposed to see.

We learned that a hop-on hop-off bus can sometimes be exactly the right amount of guidance.

We learned that getting on a tram without knowing where it's going can lead to a pretty wonderful afternoon.

We learned that things don't have to be perfect to be really good.

And we boarded a ship we weren't particularly excited about, only to find ourselves sad to leave it.

The eclipse was the reason for the trip.

But perhaps that's one of the things we're learning about travel.

The reason you go isn't necessarily what you'll remember most.

Sometimes it's totality.

Sometimes it's walking a thousand-year-old pilgrimage route.

Sometimes it's a €2.80 glass of Albariño.

Sometimes it's getting on the wrong—or perhaps exactly the right—tram.

And sometimes it's Shirley, dressed for formal night, yelling:

"Go Enginemen!"