As I write, we are already aboard another ship, the Blue Star Delos, heading from Athens to Naxos. But I am very far behind in blogging, so I will quickly write a few today.

The last week aboard the MV Explorer was fairly emotional for most people. The undergraduate students had seminars about “re-entry,” preparing to return to real-life. Even the Ship Kids had a discussion about this. A lot of the discussion centered on how to talk about this journey to those who haven’t experienced it. Also, how not to bore everyone to death droning on about how incredible it is. So, I will be brief.

This was, indeed, a pivotal experience in my life, and the life of our family. The close quarters with so many people, the quick-in and quick-out nature of the port visits, the endless ocean… it can’t help but have a profound effect. For me, the effect was to simultaneously make me feel like the world is so vast it is hard to grasp, yet small enough to see commonalities across cultures and countries that made me feel the earth is smaller than I thought. It’s an odd feeling, and hard to explain.

For Jack and Joe, it has been a sad farewell to the ship. They made great friends here, and although they liked London (more on that in the next post), saying good-bye to everyone was hard. And, perhaps not surprisingly when 800 people disembark in the same city, we continued to see “SASers” (slang for Semester at Sea people) at major tourist sites in London. So it was a constant reminder of what they were leaving behind. So this post, I include some pictures of their new good friends, and one that shows that their cabin was “kid center” for much of the voyage.

I also had to include a picture of one of the most spectacular rainbows I have ever see, which we viewed from Portsmouth, England.