Welcome to my revived blog! It’s still My Year Away, but this go-round it comes with the tagline “World Cruise Edition.” Yup, the hubs and I are going to sail around the world!

Here’s how it happened. We were about halfway through our 42-day get-away-from-winter Caribbean cruise way back in ’23. As we were getting ready for dinner, Gary looked at me and said, “For a minute there, I forgot we were on vacation. I just thought, ‘This is it. This is what we do. We live on a cruise ship.’” To say this surprised me would be an understatement because Gary was a reluctant-to-cruise kind of guy. But here’s the clincher. He followed up this observation with “And I thought that ‘living here’ was just fine.”

So, of course, I pounced.

“Well, what would you think of a really long cruise someday. Like really long. Like a 4-month round-the-world cruise?”

Silence. “Hmm. Yeah, I could do that.”

At the time, retirement was still pretty new to us and we were trying to figure out how to divide work time (restoring our historic house in Paducah, KY) and travel time. We figured we would only go on one world cruise (they are crazy expensive, after all), so the big question was “When?”

Celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary seemed like the obvious choice. After all, for our 40th, we took our first transatlantic cruise with a 3-week stay afterwards in Italy. It would be tough to top that. A world cruise certainly would. So that was that.

Except it wasn’t. The more we thought about it, the more we concluded that sooner might be better. (Not to be depressing, but there is a little bit of “it’s all downhill from here” realization when one reaches a certain age.) So the next thing I knew, we booked the cruise! We won’t quite have reached our 50th anniversary during this voyage, but Gary will celebrate his 70th birthday, which is pretty epic!

It’s hard to believe, but our World Cruise is fast approaching. We’ve been packing (Yes, we are bringing our pickleball paddles!). We’ve also been signing up for excursions. Ooh! The Maori statues on Easter Island Yes, please! Riding camels to a volcano! A cable car through the rain forest in Australia! Walking with Komodo dragons! We’re doing all of that and more.

We’ll visit about 40 different countries over our 124-day journey so there ought to be a lot to write about. (And just being on a cruise ship offers opportunities for reflection and observations.) If you’ve stumbled on this blog, I hope you’ll consider following along. And, if you’re a long-time subscriber, thanks for hanging in there for all these years.

As St. Augustine so wisely has stated: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” Circumnavigating the world in 2025 should make an spectacular Chapter One.