With fear and trembling Embry and I got our required covid tests today—the ones that are supposed to be accurate and are done by health care providers and cost a fortune—and passed. We do not have covid! At least not now, so that means we can board an Iceland Air flight from Dulles Airport to Copenhagen where we will board a Holland America cruise ship the afternoon of our arrival and begin our trip to explore the coasts of Norway, Iceland, and Scotland, then visit our friends, the Wikeleys, in Edinburgh.

Maybe you have read some of the blog posts from our past journeys.

Starting in 2015, when I turned 73 and Embry was in her late 60s, we began our cruise experience—first, a transit cruise on a Holland America ship from Fort Lauderdale to Spain, the first leg of our journey around the world without flying. Then the “cruise” across the Pacific from Shanghai to Seattle on a container ship, which was the last leg of that 4-month adventure. Following that we did a 10-day Mediterranean cruise with Embry’s bother and sister-in-law on a 60-passenger ship as part of a University of North Carolina sponsored event called the “Adventures of the Apostle Paul,” complete with lectures by the heralded atheist professor of Christian Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, Bart Ehrman. Then a Viking cruise from New Zealand to Australia in 2017 and finally in 2019, just before the dreaded covid struck, another Holland America cruise from Fort Lauderdale through the Panama Canal, around Cape Horn, and finishing in Rio with a dozen stops along the way in Panama, Peru, Chili, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. This cruise to Norway, Iceland, and Scotland was supposed to happen in the summer of 2020, then in the summer of 2021. Both were covid casualties.

All were great in their own way, although you miss a lot on cruises—especially eating local food and hanging out in parks and street benches and trying to talk to local folks, though we have stretched these cruises out a bit spending the last week or so on shore and on our own. So cruises aren’t perfect, but, hey, at our age –I am now 80–cruises are sure a lot easier.

There are three points of anxiety on this one. The first was getting a negative covid test. We passed that one today. The second is making the connection to the cruise ship in Copenhagen. We have only three hours to get from the airport to the ship, and the third, of course, is escaping covid along the way.

So here we go again. Stay tuned…