The itinerary says that we are in Charlottetown today but the weather said no. It was a rough ride from Sydney into the Northumberland Strait. Gail is not pleased with me because I slept like a kitten full of cream while she, apparently, felt every wave and heard every groan the ship made. About an hour before we were scheduled to make port our Captain announced in his Ital-english that we would not be making our call to Charlottetown. For the first 4 hours we made a staggering 4 to 5 knots in the general direction of the Confederation Bridge and just after noon we turned and started for the eastern end of the island, the plan being to sail into the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. I guess the Captain was unwilling to try to stuff our 195 foot high ship under the 200 foot high bridge during a gale. We were within 30 km (20 mi) of the Confederation Bridge before we reversed course. With a little luck, the storm will head east as we sail west and we will be able to make our call up the Saguenay Fjiord. This did, however, make a great day for people watching.
Passengers are as worthy of watching as are crew. I’m guessing the average age of passengers on this ship is in the 60 region. It is rare to see anyone not carrying or using a hand held electronic device, mostly smart phones with tablets in second place. Lap top computers are not as visible today as in days past. Today’s ships offer such good connectivity that internet services are ubiquitous. I find it amusing to walk through lounge areas of the ship watching people with their heads down, focused on smart phones. Many of these same people might very well be critical of kids over using smart phones, however, to be fair, many passengers are reading books on their devices rather than scanning social media or playing games, although that is also quite common. Books in print are still common and there is a library on board. It’s my guess that the library is in demand more for its daily distribution of crossword and sudoku puzzles than for books.
Gail and I and a few passengers regularly spend part of our mornings high up on deck 18 in a large glass lounge at the aft of the ship. They call it Skywalkers lounge and except for a late night DJ there is rarely any event scheduled for this venue. Today it became many passengers favourite place to hang out with books, computers, tablets, smartphones, card games, knitting and other pastimes.
I suppose shipboard activity preferences have changed much more quickly over time than has ship design. The theatre seems to be the area remaining most consistent. Singers or guest musicians, magicians, and Vegas style shows seem to remain popular. Other than that, the entertainment hub is focused on the Piazza, the central architectural feature of the ship. Princess has been trying to make a large lounge, Club Fusion, into a comedy club, with some success. A midships lounge, Explorers Lounge, is now game show and trivia central and it gets good attendance. Some passengers are quite serious about their trivia while others Arrive just in time to hear the answers. Most of the games are designed to embarrass someone. The Wheelhouse lounge is the only place with a wooden dance floor that is actually used, occasionally, for dancing. The only other location regularly featuring danceable music is the ceramic floor of the Piazza. Surprisingly, we did have a good dance set in Club Fusion last evening and it was well attended.
By the end of day tomorrow we will have completed two consecutive sea days with fingers crossed for a final port before our Quebec City arrival.
Edith Wharton
One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Carl Sagan
I don’t know where I am going, but I’m on my way.
A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.
Mary Ritter Beard
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Anthony Bourdain
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.
Shirley MacLaine
The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
Samuel Johnson
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, see them as they are.
Rick Steves
Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate souvenir is a broader perspective.
Paul Theroux
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
George Carlin
Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas and take your next trip in kilometers.
Mark Twain
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Susan Sontag
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Aldous Huxle
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Michael Palin
Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.
Bill Bryson
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
Matthew Karsten
Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.
Ray Bradbury
See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.
Mark Twain
One must travel to learn.
Emile Zola
Nothing develops intelligence like travel.
Augustine of Hippo
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving
Anita Desai
Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Lao Tzu
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Travel brings power and love back into your life.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
G.K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
Gustave Flaubert
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.
Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Paul Theroux
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Lin Yutang
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Horace, The Odes of Horace
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Every hundred feet the world changes.
Erma Bombeck
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Roseanne Barr
Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.
J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never
I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.”
Winna Efendi, The Journeys
Most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.
Paolo Coehlo
This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one.
Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.
Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.
James Russell Lowell
A wise man travels to discover himself.
Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.
Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Anthony T.Hincks
I’m here, and now, so are you.
Maarten Schafer, Around The World in 80 Brands
Quite some years ago, I started traveling the planet. I thought this would teach me something about the world we live in. I was wrong… It taught me something about myself. It changed me. And nothing will ever again be black-and-white again.
Jane Wilson- Howarth
A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.
M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.
Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy
I may be lost, but I’m traveling the right way.
Barnaby Allen, Pacific Viking
A port arrival makes you feel so free …To realize what it is to be a free man, with a world before him.
Rachel Wolchin
If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.
Anonymous
Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.
Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Lailah Gifty Akita
It is never too late to take another voyage.
Marty Rubin
The secret to being a good traveler is liking a place before you get there.
Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.
Pat Conroy
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Pico Iyer
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
There are several ways toreact to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.
Jawaharlal Nehru
We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.
Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
Travel does not exist without home….If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.
Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.
Erol Ozan
You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.
Clifton Fadiman
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Jennifer Lee
Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.
Hans Christian Andersen
To Travel is to Live.
Wallace Stevens
The most beautiful in the world is, of course, the world itself.
T.S. Eliot
The journey not the arrival matters.
Randy Komisar
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want Lawrence Block on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
Henry Miller
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
James Michener
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
Thomas Fuller
Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.
Martin Buber
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Lawrence Block
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Andre Gide
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Mark Twain
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Chief Seattle
Take only memories, leave only footprints.
Henry Rollins
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.
Herman Melville
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Eugene Fodor
You don’t have to be rich to travel well.
Eric Weiner
Conventional wisdom tells us… we take our baggage with us. I’m not so sure. Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home. Sometimes we do leave our baggage behind, or, even better, it’s misrouted to Cleveland and is never heard from again.
Mark Jenkins
Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self- determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. Theworld the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and- white.
Arthur Frommer
At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.
John A. Shedd
A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are build for.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Not all those who wander are lost.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.

Great analysis of the passenger preferences on board – any chance that those who follow World Series Baseball, NFL Football or other TV entertainment have a place to enjoy their preferences…..great pics of onboard locations for passenger choices…..Cheers!