We were THIS close to embarking on our latest bucket-list travel adventure to Israel, Istanbul, Jordan, and Dubai.
I bet you can guess what happened next.
When I clicked on CNN one early October morning, there it was, the huge black word – WAR – and an ominous photo of flame-trailed red missiles shooting across the dark Tel Aviv night sky.
We had booked three late-November nights in Tel Aviv, but I didn’t wonder for a moment: I knew what the stark headline and missiles meant for our latest adventure. As I set to work on the necessary cancellations and tucked our half-finished lectures back in their cases, I wondered whether we’d have a travel reason to finish them someday.
Julia Russell, a guest at The Cinema Hotel, our Tel Aviv lodging, recalled what she heard the morning of October 7th, over the intercom:
“We’re under attack. There’s been a massacre in the south. We really don’t know what’s happened. Please don’t go outside.”
Julia went on to describe how they had two minutes to hide in the hotel’s bomb shelter rooms, one on each floor (who knew?), when sirens blared and booms from detonated rockets blasted above their heads. The hotel borders Dizengoff Square, where she described ‘dignified and heartrendingly moving’ vigils continuing night after night, where Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ was sung again and again, sometimes in English, sometimes in Hebrew.
Our hearts ache for thousands of grieving human beings on any side of this conflict, whose sense of safety has been destroyed for the foreseeable future. No need to choose sides, either: Everyone.
TRAVEL PLANS COME AND GO
While we’re disheartened we don’t get to visit Israel anytime soon, especially after all we learned from our studies, we also know what lucky old people we are to still travel. We’ve been lucky in the past, and toured glorious St. Petersburg, Russia for three days, for instance, before all cruise lines dropped that port stop from their itineraries due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
So travel luck comes and goes, just as horrible wars do.
We also live in a relatively safe place where we don’t worry about killer missiles raining down on us, or where our next meal will come from. Oh sure, we might find ourselves in a bloody blazing Wild West shootout at our local Walmart, so nowhere is completely safe, but we’re mostly safe, on any given day.
So our travel disruptions pale in comparison to everything else. Travel planning is a bit of a crapshoot anyway, since we’re betting on the future, and our future may be one health crisis away from disaster. I always hesitate before dropping a deposit since I’ve had plenty of practice dealing with disappointment, and many cancellations: During Covid, we cancelled two other Mideast trips so this time I thought, ‘third time’s the charm!” – but no. No complaints about that, though. I have the privilege of planning these wonderful adventures, and I’m thankful for that.
Now, though, we book refundable trips and fares whenever possible, even if it costs a bit more, and then we hope for the best. We also sign up for travel insurance, but insurance doesn’t cover wars or pandemics, although many companies classified the recent Mideast disaster as ‘terrorism’ instead of war and covered it. I asked our Chase Sapphire insurance rep early on and she said the powers-that-be hadn’t decided what they were going to do yet, but almost all our funds have been refunded so – whew.
And we don’t know if it’s war, or terrorism, or whatever: We just know it’s absolutely awful for everyone involved.
So one might reasonably expect the old folks to sit tight, safe at home as long as we limit our Walmart trips?
Naaaaaw.
Time’s a ticking before the final journey comes for us, and we know our travel window could snap shut for good on any given day, as I said.
Soooooo…..read on to find out about where we’ll be next week:
It’s a warm island world, an ocean or two away from the war zone, with ancient temples, snorkeling, and boats!
A CRUISE? SERIOUSLY?
We pivoted quickly and booked a two-week cruise.
I know, I know, I vowed to stay off cruise ships after our Iceland cruise, when all four of us disembarked with Covid. Never say never, though – I mean what fun would that be?
We adored the Iceland trip despite the ending, when we spent a restful week post-cruise recuperating at our friend’s beautiful Long Pond, Massachusetts, home. Our covid cases were rather mild, most likely due to multiple vaccine shots and Paxlovid. Yep, vaccines protect us from disease, and while it’s true that Covid vaccines won’t keep us from catching Covid, shots CAN keep us alive, which they did.
So we know first-hand how cruise ship crowds spread germs, and we plan to take extra precautions – take the stairs, avoid crowded buffets, mask, that sort of thing. Also: Our arms ached from our RSV vaccine shots last week. Medical personnel have pumped every vaccine available into our arms in recent months, including RSV, pneumonia, Covid, flu, shingles, you name it. I caught a nasty case of pneumonia last winter before I had the pneumonia vaccine, and yikes that scared us. So we’ll happily accept all the protections our doctors recommend. We still won’t stay home (stubborn old folks, right kids?), but we’ll do our best to keep healthy while on the road.
On a recent Indiana visit, I was one of the only people in a store wearing a mask (the other one was Padre). A woman looked at my mask and chuckled. I just sighed, considering the recent brouhaha of ‘masks don’t work’ and ‘vaccines will kill you’ silliness.
I did not chuckle back at the lady – just hoped she didn’t die soon from those dangerous beliefs, as so many have. And maybe, if we had a chance to talk, she and I could agree on one truth: Forget about Covid and all the rest: Germs cause all sorts of things that kill. It’s always been that way, I would tell her; this idea is not new.
When we visited Japan in 2018, for instance, I noticed how many Japanese wore masks on the trains, at a time when no one in America did. Now, I understand why the Japanese wore those masks, which back then had nothing to do with Covid.
And now, we happily mask up like the Japanese when we face a stuffy crowd.
So I’ll come down off my soapbox now, and get to the fun things:
Where the heck are we headed this time?
SOPHISTICATED SINGAPORE and SILKPUNK SUPERTREES
Our Holland America cruise embarks from Singapore.
Singapore’s been high on the bucket list and cancelled numerous times. That triple-towered spaceship with infinity pool floating sky high? Those dazzling weird supertrees? The lotus-flowered Art/Science Museum?
Must see all that to believe it! Crazy-looking city, draped in a dazzling blanket of greenery and color and culture, with paternal controls that make it safe for travelers like us. A bit sanitized, some say, but right now ‘sanitized’ and ‘safe’ sound fine by us.
That sky-high surfboard hotel always makes me wonder if our alien overlords are about to roll down the rope ladders to conquer us at any moment. And another greenery-draped urban sanctuary hotel, the Oasis, with another infinity pool floating on floor 21? That’s the hotel we canceled a few years ago.
This time, I think we’re going to make it.
I plan to take slow lazy laps in that gorgeous pool and pretend I’m a Crazy Rich Asian for a few days – hey, we’re on the Club Floor! We’re not one of the elite, of course, or we’d be staying at the spaceship hotel, whose infinity pool you might remember from the end of the film Crazy Rich Asians. We are, in fact, headed for a Marina Bay Sands celebratory lunch right next to that dreamy pool floating in the clouds, seemingly unattached to reality.
Very cool, and close enough.
Sounds delightful, to wander around this dynamic crazy colorful city filled with hawker food and a congregation of different cultures and religions. Especially at a time of clashing conflicts worldwide, we look forward to visiting a city where humans seem to have figured out how to get along, despite their cultural and religious differences.
We plan to learn things in Singapore’s amazing museums before visiting a number of notable Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu UNESCO sites during the cruise. It’s a good thing we’ll kick the whole thing off with a visit to Singapore’s well-regarded Asian Civilizations Museum.
Also a good thing that we’ll be visiting Singapore’s Hell’s Museum at Haw Par Villa, to gain appropriate perspective! Anyone who knows Padre knows how he’s drawn to the macabre, to universal afterlife themes, so no surprise there. (That’s what you get from a former chaplain who worked his way through college in a funeral home, I do believe.)
We’ll let you know what we learn……. (IF we make it out alive, of course!!!!:-))).
TEMPLES, BEACHES, DRAGONS, And BOATS: PLENTY OF BOATS!!
Our two-week cruise takes us to the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, where we will visit oodles of temples and historical sites, snorkel at the famous pink sand beach, say ‘hi’ to Komodo dragons on their home island, visit Obama’s school in Jakarta, study the water-purification ritual in Bali, and more.
Both of us are more than ready to hit the decks once again. We miss our sailboat-owner days, and while others cruise for the dining, the drink packages, the casinos, the late-night dance floors – that is so not us.
We cruise to be on the water, reveling in stunning ocean vistas and watching boat stuff. One of our favorite on-board activities is, in fact, observing the crew’s docking and castoff procedures. That’s because it recalls faint memories of our own feeble efforts back in the day, when we managed our 30-ft Newport sailboat, Padre, at docks. Sometimes disaster ensued, and sometimes we looked like we knew what we were doing. So we’re in awe of how ship captains do what they do, manuevering these massive machines into and out of tight spaces. Incredible!
So it’s the waters, and the boat. On our 2018 transpacific cruise we sailed close to these Indonesian islands, and I remember how early in the morning the warm sea air greeted me when I walked the upper decks alone. Or I read a book on our balcony, as waves whooshed past below and the vast blue horizon beckoned.
Glorious.
THAT’S what we’re most looking forward to in the next few weeks, and stay tuned: We’ll tell you all about it as the trip unfolds.
So off we go!