“We’ve all survived! We survived a few years of the pandemic!”
The theater audience on the cruise ship Norwegian Jewel in late April excitedly cheered and applauded dynamic entertainer Stephanie Pope. Yes, it was definitely good to be cruising again. In fact, this was my husband Carl’s and my sixth cruise since October 2021. We have taken some 30 cruises over the past 25 years and had joined five other couples—longtime friends—on this eight-night cruise from San Diego to Vancouver, with port calls in , Oregon; Seattle; and Ketchikan, Alaska.
Karen and Kenzo Takizawa from Tokyo were on their first cruise. Karen (a friend since fourth grade who has lived in Japan since 1973) and her husband Kenzo had originally booked an Alaskan cruise in May 2020. And you know what happened with those plans. So, when Karen emailed me in February that they would be visiting California in April, I told her about the Norwegian Jewel cruise we had just booked….