Tropic Thunder

To all my friends  out on the East Coast, all under the presumed path of Hurricane Sandy, I’d like to say that my thoughts are with you, your friends, and your family.   I’m watching the Weather Channel, which is heavy on actual facts and light on news anchors playing daredevil stunts in 65-knot winds.  Still, this looks like the Big One, and I hope y’all are prepared.

I’m sure it will be no comfort at all to hear that, in a couple days, I’ll be having exactly the opposite experience of what you’re now going through.  Kathy has decided we’re going to the South Pacific, and who am I to say no?  I’m going off on a six-week journey, largely by ship and/or boat.  I will be touching at Oahu, Hilo, Fiji, American Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, and the Coral Sea.  I will be enjoying beaches, tropical scenery, waterfalls, volcanoes, geysers, exotic rum drinks, caverns lit only by phosphorescent worms, Maori country, coral reefs, and a total eclipse of the sun!!!

I’m going to finish the trip with a week on a catamaran, doing four or five dives per day on the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef.  (Sharks, I’d start being scared right now.)

After which I’ll have a 30-hour flight home and re-appear in New Mexico in the middle of December.  Wow.  Suck.

One thing I won’t be doing is spending a lot of time on the Internet.  I doubt, for example, that the catamaran will even have an Internet connection.  If I’m anywhere else, the Internet connection will be something I’m paying for, and so I won’t be spending long hours posting pensive essays, except on one of the following conditions:

• Something’s gone wrong, and I’m really bored, or;

• Something’s gone wrong, and I’m really pissed off.

I’ll do my best to upload beautiful pictures of oceanic and tropical scenes, though.

Right now, though, I’ve got to start packing my scuba gear and making sure nothing gets left behind.

And as for packing, the biggest problem is that we’re packing for way too many experiences and climates.  Tropical sun.  Underneath the ocean.  New Zealand fjords and glaciers.  Formal dinners, in dinner jacket and cravat.  And we’ll be carrying a telescope, which we’ll be using only for a few hours.  Plus I’m carrying two cameras (one good underwater), a laptop, and an iPad.

Sigh.  Even when I was a teen traveling through Europe with a backpack, I tended to overpack.

For a taste of my tropical experience, please enjoy Jimmy Buffet’s “One Particular Harbor,” with its lovely Polynesian chorus.  (Though I realize that for some of you it should be another Buffet song, “Tryin’ To Reason With the Hurricane Season.”  All I can say to you is, Wish you were here . . . )