Okay. Well, what can I say? I’ve already admitted that I love to travel, and, for this year, I was presented with a couple of offers that I just couldn’t refuse.
In addition to the trip to Israel that I’ve mentioned earlier, I was offered the chance to lecture on a British Isles cruise in July. As a lifelong Anglophile, I could hardly turn that down.
Especially since I was also invited to speak on a cruise to the Norwegian fjords that leaves on the very next day after the British Isles cruise ends, from the very port (Southampton) at which it ends.
Convenience itself.
I know, I know. I’ve probably overcommitted myself. But who could resist such a combination?
And I’ve promised myself that I’m going to get some real work done — reading and writing, mostly — during these two jaunts. Cruises are relaxing.
I’ve visited Norway on a few previous occasions over the past nearly three decades. My grandmother grew up there. And I still have family there, though the generation of his relatives that I met with my father during my first and second visits is almost entirely, if not completely, gone — as, sadly, is he. Some of them still own the farm, Søgnesand, at the end of Kjøsnesfjord in Jølster, where my grandmother lived until she left for America at about eighteen, never to return. (The farm is just out of sight in the photograph below, at the near end of the fjord but behind the vegetation-covered slide that comes down from the upper left of the picture. Click on the photo to enlarge it.)
Anyway, I’m advertising shamelessly, as I said I would, for these two cruises. It’s my blog, after all.
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