Lagging Behind

After being away for over two weeks it feels good but strange to be home. Traveling across ten time zones in less than 24 hours really does something to your body clock and it is taking me a while to get readjusted. I’m having a hard time staying awake until bedtime and an even harder time sleeping past 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. I’m not used to being up before the sun! When we left we were still enjoying summer weather but the season definitely turned in our absence. It’s time to put the sandals away and pull out the handknit socks. The house seems strangely empty with Jessica gone and only Matthew still at home.

Our busy itinerary didn’t allow much time for knitting but I did manage to finish Clue 3 of the Nancy Bush mystery socks on one of our days at sea.

I couldn’t wait to tackle the final clue once we got home but surprisingly it was two days before I even felt like knitting and even then I could only handle some basic stockingette. It wasn’t until yesterday that I was ready for something that demanded more concentration and I worked a few more pattern repeats on the mystery socks. I’m hoping to finish those soon so I can turn my attention to this month’s SKA challenge. Here it is, almost the end of the first week of October and I haven’t even decided which pattern I’m doing! Not like me at all. Oh well, I know I will feel more like myself in a few days so I just have to cut myself some slack until then. Any discomfort I feel now is a small price to pay for the experiences I’ve had in the past few weeks.

Since 1993 the company Cameron works for has been offering an incentive program to its customers, in which they can apply a portion of their purchases towards the cost of a bi-annual cruise. Some company employees are invited on the trip and in addition to engaging in some general schmoozing with the approximately 1000 customers, host a table for dinner each evening. Thanks to Cameron’s position as a regional manager, we are automatically included among the chosen few and have been lucky enough to go on six cruises, including this year’s trip to the Eastern Mediterranean. The company’s owner and president does his best to make each trip unique and special and has arranged some truly memorable experiences. In the past we’ve been paraded down Canal St. in New Orleans before embarking on a dinner cruise on a Mississippi riverboat, watched an exclusive performance of the Broadway show, “Movin’ Out”, and enjoyed private concerts by Credence Clearwater Revisited, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman of The Guess Who, and Trooper.

This year’s cruise began in Istanbul and included various stops in Turkey, Egypt, and Greece before ending in Athens, where Cameron and I spent three days’ holiday on our own. Over the course of fifteen days we visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul

and looked out over the waters of the Bosphorus,

toured the ruins of Ephesus, once the third largest city in the ancient world, next to Alexandria and Rome,

took in breathtaking views on the Greek islands of Mykonos,

Santorini,

and Crete,

gazed at the Great Pyramids of Giza,

watched night fall on the Sphinx,

stood on the original starting block in the Stadium at Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympics,

explored the hilltop fortress at Nafplion, the first modern capital of Greece,

and were awed by the Parthenon atop the Acropolis in Athens.

We ate delicious Greek food,

rode a camel (well, Cameron did—I took pictures),

wore goofy Egyptian headdresses

and rocked out with Tom Cochrane against the backdrop of the pyramids and Sphinx.

Truly the trip of a lifetime. Is it any wonder I’m having trouble readjusting to real life?