Cruises recalled

Time flies like the wind, and house flies like horse manure."

Don't know who originated that unique bit of barnyard philosophy but I do remember our late friend and mountain climbing guru, Dr. Gordon Edwards, quoted it in a letter to me several years back. Got to talking to First Wife Iris last Monday about how time flies faster as you get older and the question arose as to what we were doing 20 years ago. "That's easy," I said. "Records are one of the many neat things about writing a column." Looked back to late winter 1988, and this is what I found:

About the time the average Hungry Horse reader hunkers down with this week's issue, First Wife Iris and I will be well down the west coast of Baja aboard the good ship Royal Odyssey, approaching Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We will be bound for the Panama Canal via Puerto Vallarta, Zihuatanejo, and Acapulco, Mexico, and Caldera, Costa Rica. There will be no shore excursions in either Guatemala or Nicaragua.

Providing the American troops guarding the Canal are still in command on the 18th, we will pass through there to the Caribbean and go to Cartagena, Columbia in South America. We sail around the tip of Venezuela to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles on the 20th, thence up the windward side of the Lesser Antilles and past the Virgin Islands to the north shore of Puerto Rico, and we'll finally fly home from San Juan on the 22nd.

That's the plan. This 15-day trip covers approximately 11,000 miles with more than half by jet, and a few by an old train that used to run in Montana. Now it puffs its way to San Jose, Costa Rico, from the Pacific Ocean through the jungles to the continental divide below the Nicaraguan border.

The Royal Odyssey has elegant dining rooms, six cocktail lounges, a gambling casino, two swimming pools, theater, ball room, shopping mall, gymnasium, live floor shows every night, and you name it. Iris and I lucked out and got an outside suite with windows, bath and shower.

My only other big boat ride across an ocean was aboard the luxury liner Taft, named after our 27th President. There was a small inconvenience. That ship had originally been designed to carry 500 people, but the government remodeled it so they could stuff about 5,000 dog face G.I.s on there, and they renamed it U.S.S. Holbrook. The remodeling did nothing to enhance the ship's rating as a "luxury liner."

Took us 11 days to cross the seas to England, including two days of terrible storms in the North Atlantic. About 4,981 of my fellow passengers got an upset stomach. My company was stacked in hammocks six deep in the area that had been the Taft's swimming pool and the big waves and wind often made it too dangerous to go topside for urping.

Lucky for us the war had ended, so we didn't have to worry about some German submarine stickin' a torpedo in the belly, but there were still a lot of mines floating around and a special pilot came aboard at Dover, England, to guide us through the cleared area into the German submarine base of Bremerhaven.

While we were making those last few miles into port, the chaplains and a doctor gave long speeches about there being millions of women in Europe whose husbands and boyfriends had been killed in the war. They told us that we were not to commit hanky panky with those women, and then they said that because most troops were not paying enough attention to the warnings, six out of every 10 young men on that ship would get a serious social disease before he returned to America. Then they showed slides of guys maimed and dying from serious diseases. This caused another round of urping and ruined yet another fine supper in the Holbrook's gourmet mess hall.

I was impressed enough by my first ocean cruise that I swore I would never go willingly aboard any boat over 12 feet long, on any body of water larger than Mac Winnegar Slough, but time does heal. And now, after well over 40 years, I've decided that surely this time… things just have to be a lot better.

(Note: Here in 2008 and reflecting back, it is a joy to remember that second cruise was more relaxing: however, I did sort of miss my rifle.)

G. George Ostrom is the news director of KOFI radio and a Hungry Horse News columnist.