Full days at sea - long way from anywhere!

For Boulder Country Day


Ryan and Luke say "hi" to all of their classmates back home and wish everyone good luck in their first day back at school. We started school yesterday, even though it was Sunday. One good thing about being at sea is that the school day is shorter, one bad thing is that Mom and Dad are teaching us.

There is no jungle gym here so we can't climb and play like at home. But there is a pool - it is very small - maybe 20 feet by 10 feet and only five feet deep. There are two little pools on the sides. Here is a picture. We thought the little pools were kiddie pools until the ship started to go through big waves today. Then we saw that the mini-pools catch all the water that comes out of the pool when the ships rolls. When the ship rolls a lot, they catch some of the water and rest spills out! The pool is full of salt water from the ocean and right now it is very cold. We also have a sport court with a net all around it and even a net roof. It keeps the balls from going over the side of the ship.

We saw dolphins today when we were eating lunch but we didn't get any pictures. We also have a small bird following the ship. We are hundreds of miles from land so we are not sure where it came from. Since we are so far away from anywhere, we can't see any land anywhere. But we did see another ship today.  It was a container ship going from Europe to North America.
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Day 2 comes to a close. We've had two full days on the ship and two days away from port. It feels like we have been on here for longer than that but we are chalking that up to all the time we have to do things on board - as opposed to the scarier concept that we are starting to get cabin fever already!!!

If anything, the days should be feeling short since we are now about to lose our second hour to time change in two nights. It makes for interesting times getting the boys to bed.....or awake after a short night's sleep. And we have hit some rougher seas - nothing horrible but much more apparent than our first day at sea. Having the first day be so gentle was a good thing as we managed to adjust more slowly to the motion of the ocean. Today we did have more people bouncing off the walls!

We settled into a few courses. We all take the core Global Studies course, which is based on Thomas Friedman's book, "Hot, Flat and Crowded" and will feature lectures from several different professors. It promises to be an interesting look into globalization and revolutionary technology, and how we are all affected by it. There is an underlying theme of sustainability in many discussions and part of the focus here will be on how the rest of the world can reach Western standards of living without decimating the planet. Beyond that, we are all auditing various electives - in a few days we will have a quiz posted about who is taking which courses.

The kids actually got into the pool yesterday, despite the water and the air being in the 60's at the most. The water and air temps here in the North Atlantic are suprisingly similar to one another. Since the pool water is straight from the ocean and was recently pumped in, it hasn't had a chance to warm up much. The pool is in the middle of the "social deck" and the weight "room", so the boys were splashing around with a whole bunch of college students.

Today's observation number one came as Christy and I tried to get in our weight workouts: working out on a moving floor is not easy. It is really hard to describe how difficult it is to do any exercise involving balance when the floor is moving. And most exercises seem to involve keeping your balance. I can imagine this is what it's like trying to work out at the tail end of a very successful New Year's Eve party. It is pure entertainment to watch people doing lunges and core stability exercises while the ship is rolling back and forth. Even more entertaining is watching people play basketball when the hoop is swaying back and forth to the motion of sea. There is some interesting physics going on there.

Observation number 2 is that we must snack a lot at home. Breakfast is cleared at 8:30 sharp. (In a side note, apparently the 8:30 sharp part is now crystal clear as there were lots of students talking about how hungry they were after missing breakfast. We can now commiserate since we also managed to miss breakfast this morning.) Lunch is at noon and dinner around 6:30. By the time we get to any of these meals, our stomachs are growling, despite eating full meals (with dessert!) and being confined to a ship. Either a) we snack a lot at home or; b) we have already picked up tapeworms or; c) maybe Chinese food rules apply to shipboard meals too - the natural law that is evident when you walk out of the Chinese restaurant 7 pounds heavier, having removed your belt, and yet less than three hours later you feel like going back in for round two at the buffet. We'll keep you up to date as to whether it's a tapeworm, the natural law of Chinese food or whether we are constantly eating at home.