2024 Year In Review

 Every year, when I sit down at the end of December to summarize what's happened over the last 12 months, and I really look back at all the experiences I had, I think, “wow, that was amazing, it's gonna be a tough act to follow.” And every New Year's Eve the universe says back to me, “Challenge accepted!” 2024 definitely aced it.

El Galeon Andalucia. (This is a publicity photo. I never get to see photos like this, because I'm on the ship at the time ... and that's definitely not something to complain about!)

This was an epic travel year for us. El Galeon was the star of our year, inspiring almost 6 months of exploring Europe. After volunteering for the Fundacion for ten years (minus Covid times) on various of their ships on this side of the Atlantic, we had an opportunity to spend 3 months as sailors and historic interpreters on the other side of the "pond." And of course since we were over there anyway, we tacked on some tourism on either end of our gig. We visited known tourist cities like London, Barcelona, and Reykjavik; and also places that I either had never heard of or wouldn't have gone to without the ship sailing schedule: Ramsgate, Brugge, Delfzijl. The blog has/will have detailed photo dumps and reactions to all of these, but I also wanted to pull the big takeaway lessons from this most remarkable  year.

Sometimes you've just gotta be a tourist. I have a photo of myself here with my parents when we visited on a family vacation; I was about 17 at the time. Here's Dan at the same spot more than 50 years later. Not many changes till now, except it's a lot more crowded.

Ramsgate and England's massive chalk cliffs. We got up super-early one morning to try to see the sunrise from England's easternmost point. Well worth the walk.

 We spent 3 weeks in February/March on Aruba and less than 6 weeks later were off again, to Iceland; so from tropical warmth to arctic cold. The week we spent there was in no way enough as we hiked a glacier, ate bread that had been cooked in a geothermal hot spring, felt the heat of molten lava, and learned about the isolated independent bold culture, wildlife, rugged scenery and geology.

The warmest we were all year was in February on this sunset kayak paddle in Aruba.

Ice tunnel in Perlan museum in Reykjavik. This one is a construction, but there are real glaciers and ice caves you can visit elsewhere along the south coast.

I can't pronounce the proper name, but they call it "Diamond Beach" for the English speakers. Ice breaks off the glacier just behind this shore and is carried here by the wind and waves. 

Of course it wouldn't be “us” if we didn't visit every local museum we could find – I love learning the stories small towns tell about themselves – as well as the big famous national museums.

We learned to navigate London's double decker buses and the underground (subway) to visit the famous Natural History museum there.

And also, smaller local museums. This one reconstructed a "row" (lane) in the 1950s before herring fishing in northeastern England collapsed.

The maritime museum in Barcelona included a replica of Magellan's ship the Nao Trinidad.

Almost all the cork in the world comes from just a few countries, and 50% of it comes from Portugal. They have an entire museum dedicated to cork! 

Yes, I do like it when everyone follows the rules, so I took a selfie where indicated.

We went sailing! (I hadn't realized how much we missed this ship until we came aboard again. How can it possibly have been over six years?) No matter how many books you read, you don't really “feel” the history until you walk these decks. I tell the visitors who come aboard about how challenging the voyage was both physically and emotionally for these settlers headed for new lives across the ocean … and with all that, they went anyway, so imagine how bad life must have been in Europe if people thought this was their best option! Limited or spoiled food, water went foul after about 3 weeks and there was scarcely enough for drinking, never mind bathing, and sharing the limited space with 200 or more of your closest "friends" and their scant possessions. That was just the uncomfortable part of the voyage, then there were dangers of storms, pirates.  And imagine the scary night with primitive navigation … they couldn't know exactly what their longitude was, so they must have been wondering, “Are we too close to the coast and will we crash on the rocks? Farther away than we think and we'll run out of food and water before we get there?” And then you see the first faint line on the horizon as the black night fades to the darkest gray and you think, we made it, for this day at least. And the relief they must have felt. This, I believe, is why birds sing in the morning – “I made it! I'm still here!” Maybe there's ancestral memory of those times deep in our bones; perhaps it's why we have so many photos of sunrise from the ship. Or maybe it's just because all day every day is nothing but blue, blue sky and blue water, or gray, and it gives those 15 minutes of orange at the beginning and end of each day an outsize importance.

Yes it's fun, but it's also legit work!

I do like to steer.

Adventures, as Bilbo Baggins notes, are not all pony rides in the May sunshine!

We had the BEST shipmates. 

I think this is pretty much all of us, at a barbeque onboard that just "happened" to coincide with our last day.

Work hard, play hard, at a crew party aboard one of the other ships in a tall ship festival in Belgium

One passage was so rough you had to "dance" just to continue standing upright on the moving deck. Nico and Alfonso demonstrate the fancy footwork, safely docked in a calm harbour this time.

And met some truly memorable people on the rest of our travels. 

Doesn't it look like Dan is the reserved one, and the proper English doorman at our fancy hotel is the lively one?  He was full of "dad" jokes, and loved hearing our sailing stories.

We had a Jack Sparrow in every port, and I eventually built up an entire album of pictures of them on my phone.

These ladies told us the story of smugglers in Poole, on the south coast of England, where the women didn't smuggle directly, but collaborated with the men who did. The women would go down to the waterfront to meet the ships, dressed in ordinary (if particularly loose and shapeless) dresses. When they arrived, they'd take off their clothes, wrap themselves in many layers of silk that the smugglers were bringing, then put on their ordinary dresses over to cover the silk up again, and walk right past the customs agents without paying the import duties.

This gentleman played the best smooth jazz to entertain tourists standing in line to enter an attraction in Porto, Portugal.

People are the same in one way everywhere you go – it amazed me what, over time, you can learn to take in stride (or take for granted?) I remember a former captain who reminded me that my everyday life on the ship is someone else's “once in a lifetime.” 

An oldie, but one of my favourite all-time photos. Just doing my ordinary everyday job, helming a "pirate ship" a.k.a. El Galeon, in New York City in 2017. 

Turns out, it's not just me who after a while takes the most extraordinary things in life for granted after a while. While we were in Newcastle, one of the guests told us that Hadrian's wall (that protected the northern border of the Roman Empire) ran through his town, and and he'd be happy to show us the remnants of it that still stood on our next day off if we'd like. Omigosh YES we'd love that! A few of the pieces he showed us had informative plaques, but in one case, the section of ancient wall just ran through a neighborhood and people drove by it every day barely taking notice at all, it was just part of the scenery. How? This ancient wonder was hardly ho-hum.

A chunk of Hadrian's Wall that once ran from sea to sea across northern England. The cars mostly don't even slow down when they pass this remarkable bit of ancient engineering. 

Even more in the “you-can-get-used-to-anything” category was our second visit to Iceland, where lava flows were greeted with little more than a shrug. Smelled like burning car brakes and you could see the red glow at night, but our guide just casually described the differences between the brand new landscape, that had literally just been deposited by the volcano and the area opened by the government 48 hours ago level of new, to what he remembered from his childhood.

Brand new landscape just a few days old. We drove across another section not too far from here, where the signs warned you not to slow down or get out of your car because the still-warm lava made the road hot enough to melt your tires if you stayed still too long!

“Old” means something different in Europe than it did in Colorado, where a 100-year-old building was considered historic. In Europe, they barely took notice until structures were 1,000 years old! 

The ruins of Whitby Abbey. Yes you can drive there but we didn't have a car. It was a rainy muddy climb to the top of the hill, but we took the day we were given.

Brugge, Belgium.

Pinkney, Scotland

Girona, Spain

Street scene in Whitby, England

Narrow passage in Girona, Spain.

Victoria Street, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Every town we visit, we crew come into town like rockstars, because of the ship's notoriety. The reception is completely different than we'd get if we were just random retired couple touring in our minivan; we rarely got the chance to buy our own drinks at local pubs if we were willing to trade a pint for a sea story or two. And also, if we'd come by minivan, from the freeway past the strip malls to the cramped and dusty historic downtown with no place to park, again the experience would be radically different than arriving by ship docking at the port and seeing the town the way it grew organically, inland from the harbor, scaled to and limited by how far we could walk. By the time we got to Scarborough we were thinking like medievals, ooh, this is a nice protected harbour and up there on the hill would be a good place for a castle to defend it.

Ship docked in Scarborough, viewed from the hill behind the town where sure-enough-there-was-a-castle-right-where-we-expected-it-to-be Scarborough Castle (or, more properly, its ruins) stood.

Another fun thing again because of our celebrity status as crew, was how we got the “inside scoop” on lots of local traditions and quirks. People were proud of their towns and would tell us things that made it unique, perhaps in exchange for the stories we told them about the ship. 

The Dutch "Santa Claus," Sinterklaas, by traditional story, brings gifts not by sleigh from the North Pole, but by ship from Madrid. We visited the ship that he travels on today, and saw the robe he wears.

Why am I including a picture of a toilet? Many American visitors to Plymouth, England go to the "Mayflower Steps," close to the location where the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower for their journey to the New World. But the place where the memorial is, isn't the exact historical location. The real location, before the harbour was expanded by waterfront development, is in the bathroom of the ladies room in the basement of the pub across the street from the place where all the Americans take their selfies. I would definitely not have learned this if we were just "random retired couple touring in their minivan," but the harbormaster was all too ready to share a giggle with us ship crew and let us in on the secret.

This pedestrian bridge across the river in Girona, Spain was designed by the designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

A smuggler's tunnel near Poole, England.

Besides my basic tour and facts, people loved learning where everyday expressions came from. I'd ask them what they thought “pulling your weight” came from and if they had kids I'd get the kids to demonstrate by pulling themselves up on some of the tied-off lines. We had a group of blind folks and set a special tour for them; it was enlightening to go through the ship in advance and try to explain it based on things they could touch (the scale of the bell, they held the rigging and felt it vibrate in the wind, the smooth fine wood in the zona noble compared to the rough texture of the deck). Hardest for me were the inevitable questions about whether these would be slave ships (this was England, where sadly it played an important part in history) and I'd redirect to a comparison of the Spanish slavery as a legal state vs the English chattel concept. I remembered one black gentleman, somewhere, years ago, who asked about if they would have been in the hold (looking down from the gun deck) and I just couldn't give him what he wanted  to feel in his gut. It was weird too when people asked about the Spanish Armada (oops, about 100 years before the time of this ship) but again they're seeing it through the lens of victorious England while to us they're the enemy!

Our crew "pulling their weight" to raise the main sail -- all 4,400 pounds of it!

We saw lots of monuments, statues, cathedrals and castles built on a grand scale ...

Mosque/cathedral, Cordoba, Spain.

Another section of the mosque/cathedral

Train station (!!) in Portugal used to be a nunnery

Stained glass window in cathedral in Barcelona

Castle in Leiria, Portugal

Where we're used to seeing statues of kings and generals on horses, the Moors built statues commemorating philosophers and doctors in Cordoba. 

... but we were equally enchanted by local bars and bookstores. 

Irish pub. 

This place is nicknamed "the most beautiful bookstore in the world," Porto, Portugal. 

And in Reykjavik, Iceland, we found a bar and bookstore in one! 

Our sailing community is relatively small but geographically spread out, so we were delighted to have the opportunity to reconnect. And of course the ship itself is quite the attraction! Shout-out to Raf, April, Jemima, Ross, Curt and Kathy for making the efforts to connect with us while we were in your area.

And a few more somewhat random fun photos from the summer:

Gorgeous tile is everywhere in Portugal.

"Polar Bear Souvenirs" in Iceland.

It would be very hard to pick a favourite place, they all had such different character, but Porto, Portugal was on our list.

Duoro Valley during the wine harvest.

We hiked partway up this glacier in Iceland; the views were amazing.

"Moors" could mean "ties up a ship," or "North African invaders of the Iberian Peninsula," or "misty landscape in England and Scotland." Technically we touched on all three meanings on this trip.

My fitness tracker said I'd walked over 900 km in these boots.

Lots of time for looking, and thinking, at sea.

"I love my job"

Farewell until next year, beloved ship.

After all that travel, we just needed some quiet time when we got home – some new-to-us hikes, working on art [mostly rediscovering, reprinting and reframing some favourite old pieces, and making them new again], and ironically the best northern lights we saw were right back home, here off Cinderella's bow. 

And here's the thing that to me sums up the entire year. If you've been following our FB/Instagram you'll see that I've been playing a bit with ai backgrounds. I was scouring our recent photos to find ones that were amenable to having the ai remove the background and replace it with something fun – a goblin forest or a snowy mountain. And then I realized that all the fantasy backgrounds (northern lights, a storm at sea, a medieval street, a castle, a famous city landmark) were already in our photo history … in their real-life versions!