The Bridge - Day One of Our Bermuda Cruise Vacation

I almost went to prison in order to get this shot.

I hate packing.  If there is one single task that would make me not plan a trip, a cruise or a walk across the room, it would be packing for the journey. Packing seems like taking everything you own on vacation. It wears me out .  I become stressed.  I am not fun to be with while performing the drudgery of packing.  However, my deodorant, toothbrush and underwear all get to go where ever I go worry free.  I worry if I am taking enough cash.  I worry about whether or not the van that is going to take us to Bayonne will get here let along get here on time.  Even when the van gets here earlier than expected, I worry about whether the van will get us to the ship.  Why do I worry about that?  Because the van driver who makes five trips a week to NYC gets in the van on Boas Street and immediately sets his GPS to where I tell him we are going.  Heaven help us!  As the second hand continually makes its sixty-second journey across the face of time and the odometer continues to add by one-tenths, all the stress, worry and anxiety slowly drain through the hour glass of time and are buried in the sand. 
I did not even let the fact that, as we passed the exit for Cabella's, the Ford van started to signal the driver and all conscience occupants of the van that the anti-lock breaking system was failing.  Not a problem because I know we only have to really stop once and that is at Cape Liberty.  Heck, he has a whole week while I am cruising to get the van repaired.
There was another unscheduled stop.  It seems the one who needs a GPS to find my ship is also being paid to transport coffee from York to a rest stop just across the PA/NY line.  As I exit the van somewhere inside the Garden State, a much less stressed traveler is heard saying, "Wow! Bermuda looks an awful lot like New Jersey!" The tourch that lights the Delp sense of humor and warped way of looking at life has certainly been passed from my generation to the next.

"Welcome Aboard!" to the love-of-my-life.

The van reached Cape Liberty, stopping at the correct place without incident,  Hallelujah!   This was followed in order by 1) a quick baggage check-in at the van, 2) a quicker passenger check-in 3) a short walk through the terminal where I (click) was yelled at by a uniform wearing, badge toting, lady of the up-sized fashion world (click, click) for taking pictures inside the building (click), 4) a bus ride of about 300 yards and 5) a walk across the gang-plank.
A grip, a grin, a glass of bubbly champagne and eleventy-billion "Welcome aboards" made me realize that this is for real and there's no turning back. 

A buzzing beehive. The crackling caused by electricity between to wires. The high energy excitement of my fellow passengers, as we waited for and finally heard the deep throat-ed bullfrog blast of the ships horn signaling our departure from terra firmam, filled the air. It's difficult to tell exactly when the ship breaks the chains of inertia but I realized that we were indeed moving forward and that New York City was not moving away.

Lady Liberty in New York Harbor

Lady Liberty shone her light for us as she waved goodbye while NYC feel off the stern and vanished in our wake.  NYFD joined the festivities and said 'bon voyage' by sending a fire boat to create a rainbow for our departing pleasure. Approaching and finally passing beneath the Verrazano Narrows Bridge puncuated the departure as the masses began to sing and dance to the frenzied beat of the pool band.

Unlike the rolling crescendo of excitement that climaxed with the bridge passing, the entrance to the sea and the announcement that luggage had been delivered to the rooms perpetuated an instant evaporation of energy and excitement on-board the Summit.
As the sunset on Day One of our cruise, the Main Land gradually disappeared in our rear-view mirror.  The sleep that was chased from us the night before by worry and packing, caught up to us as we set out watches ahead one-hour and sailed east into the darkness that would be our bridge from the real world to the amazing fantasy we were about to experience on the Atlantic Ocean.  - DD

A Speck on a Speck on a Speck

I have seen the horizon from what ever my vantage point has been while living my fifty-nine years here in Central Pennsylvania. I have stood on various beaches of neighboring New Jersey, our first state Delaware, as well as Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, cast my gaze eastward and wondered at what lay beyond. I have driven across the flat plains of northern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois seeing a horizon uninterrupted by hills and mountains. I believed that the world could not be bigger nor more expansive.

That all changed for me on 11 June 2012. I awoke that morning to the knowledge that I would be several hundred miles at sea aboard the Celebrity Summit steaming methodically towards Bermuda. Upon leaving the stateroom and walking out on the aft deck I was greeted by a site, by a world for which I was unprepared. I was not surprised by what I saw nor was I taken aback by it. Rather I stood in awe of what I was visually perceiving. I was humbled by the vastness of the sea and the sky. The sea was a deep blue that I had never seen nor could I have ever imagined. The blue I was looking at was never ever found in my 128-pack of Crayola crayons. I am sure Sherwin-Williams does not have that blue on any of their paint pallets either. The edge of the sea, zippered to the sky at some far off distant point on the horizon, provided the perfect contrast in colors enabling me to have some feeling for the depth and expanse of the sky and the sea. The blue sky was splashed with the purest of pure white cumulus clouds that added texture and bas relief to my world.

As I stood for a long time soaking in the beauty of God's creation, I began to think just how small a piece I was to the wholeness of the Earth. Like each and every drop of water that comprised the ocean upon which I was sailing, like those water droplets, I am just another speck of humanity that makes up all the sum total of people that ever did or ever will walk the face of this planet.

At night on the same aft deck of the Celebrity Summit, while shielding my eyes from the deck lights, I was able to accomplish the most anticipated part of the voyage. I wanted to see the night sky as God intended for mankind to see it. I did not want street lights or the illuminating glow from some far off mall or town to bleach that which God created for our pleasure from the canvass of the night sky. The black sea sky looked like a black jewelers cloth that had been laid out which then had handfuls of diamonds cast upon it. It was magnificent. Familiar constellations became difficult to identify because they now were comprised of so many more stars. The night black that filled in the spaces between the determining stars of thye heavenly figures were now salted with thousands and thousands of never seen before stars.

This magnificence was ratcheted up a notch when I gazed again at this new found universe through my binoculars. The night sky, the heavens that cover the earth, became three dementional. The thousands of new stars I had just discovered were now joined by millions more. The stars went from being diamonds scattered on a cloth to diamonds suspended in a multi-layered world of black. Wow!

Upon experiencing this I thought that this entire sea experience for me was humbling yet an awaking for me. Humbling because I felt like just a speck, upon the vastness of the sea, which in turn is small in comparison the the size of the Earth, which is small when compared to the size of the solar system, which when placed spinning in the vastness of the universe I just saw, is in and of itself just a speck. A speck on a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck.

It was at this point when I was feeling very diminutive, that I realized that I was wrong in thinking this way. The creator of all that I was seeing and being part of, the same creator that created all this created me too. Not only that He created me and loves me so much that He gave His Son the same human form that I have, sent Him to Earth to experience all the things that I have and eventually was asked to redeem me for the Father upon a Roman cross.

I never expected to get all that from an evening four-hundred plus miles at sea but I did. I am glad I did because I really understand that there is no place that I can go that God isn't there with me and attending to my needs.