Oh the Places I'll Go

 Some readers of my blogs may remember my tale of anguish in February of 2020 as the Covid pandemic was rampaging across Asia, and I was sailing around the South China Sea onboard the beautiful Crystal Symphony hoping that one day a port would agree to let us dock.  We eventually disembarked safely in Singapore.  I had been so enamored with the ship I was on, that I booked additional cruises, including a World Cruise planned for 2022.  While I returned home to wait out the pandemic in isolation, the cruise industry (along with other tourist-intense businesses) suffered significant losses.  Crystal declared bankruptcy, and my anticipated future cruise deposits were lost.  I recovered some of my money through one of my credit cards, some through the bankruptcy court, and some as future cruise credits issued by the company that ultimately purchased Crystal’s two ocean ships, in an attempt to lure back Crystal’s former passengers. In September of 2025, I was ...

In Before Covid (BC) times, Scott and I had planned to sail the Rhine River in December of 2020 in order to experience the magic of Europe’s Christmas Markets.  As everyone knows, travel in 2020 was cancelled, and we were forced to postpone our planned trip for a year.   Unfortunately, Covid times are still with us; in fact, they are making a strong resurgence in many European nations.  We are happy to report that we have been able to visit many Christmas markets in the past ten days (and have continued to test negative on our nearly-daily covid tests). We traveled the Rhine with our very good friends, Monica and Loren Kersting.   Monica and I first met nearly forty years ago when she was a student of mine in the school psychology graduate program at what is now called Minnesota State University—Moorhead.   She and Loren married about the same time that I married Scott.   The men had nearly as much in common as Monica and I did, and during our years ...