Akavit

I’m going on a week long cruise tomorrow. This is going to be my 10th or 11th or 12th cruise – I simply can’t remember. You can give me a break. I started cruising 30 years ago.

I have learned some things along the way, however. So I am going to remind myself of them in hopes that this is a more successful cruise than the last dozen or so.

I hereby resolve that:

I won’t think the mandatory lifeboat drill is draining half an hour out of my cruise time. It shows me who the passengers in my area are, where to assemble in an emergency, and, if I watch, how they react. I am a certifited SCUBA diver and I have filled up a log book with dives. I don’t like to dive with people who don’t take the buddy rule seriously. I don’t like anyone who doesn’t take safety seriously. Should anything happen on the cruise, I want to know as much about the safety procedures as I can because I know most people will know nothing. Should anything happen, I’ll probably be helping the crew.

I won’t try to drink Akavit with the officers. This shit is 40 percent alcohol. They are used to it. It is made in Scandinavia and it is Latin for “water of life.” If you grew up on 3.2 beer, this shit is “water of death.” I have no idea how they survive drinking this stuff, much less how they run the ship.

I will not try to eat everything in the galley in the first three days of the trip. I’ve tried this before. Actually, you can’t help but try. When was the last time you had hot and cold running free food? Only an a cruise. The only hope you have is that the third day is a day at sea and it is rough. Then you learn how 95-pound runway models eat. Or actually do the opposite.

I will not go to the spa. This is a place where you pay $250 for a gorgeous oriental girl to rub hot rocks on your skin for an hour. Now, assuming you are sane, how much would you really pay anyone to rub hot rocks on your skin? If you don’t know, I’ll be happy to rub hot rocks on your skin for $100 an hour. I’ll do it all day long. I’ll make about four times as much as I did when I was programming computers. I’m not a gorgeous oriental girl, so you get $150 an hour off.

I will go into the casino, but only because they have designed the ship so that is the only way you can get from the front to the back when it rains. Whenever this is necessary, I advise you to leave your wallet in your cabin. Enough said?

I will not go into the casino late at night.

I swear I will not.

Not even if it has the last bar open.

And I’ll put money on that.

Dream Come True

The Owner's Suite on the Norwegian Sky.

I have been a cruising fan for 20 years. My first cruise was a week long trip on the SS Norway, formerly the SS France, at the time the longest cruise ship ever built at 1,035 feet. It was a trans-Atlantic ship before being rebuilt for the Carribbean trade.

Those were the days of two seatings for dinner and at least two nights where my off-the-rack suit was outed by the tuxes of other passengers.

I still remember the people at my table, including the 20-something plumber from Philadelphia who immediately convinced our table server that he needed two of everything and regailed us with stories about drinking with the crew and actually waking up one morning under the pool table in the crew quarters.

I’ve been on ships owned by all of the cruise lines that operate out of Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

I’ve had cabins so low in the ship that you were lulled to sleep by the engines. I’ve had cabins on older ships where you could hear conversations in the neighboring cabin. I’ve had cabins with balconies and I will advise you never to have anything less.

Last weekend, I put up the money and got what I have dreamed about ever since that first cruise – the Owners Suite. For the price of a week long cruise, I got the Owner’s Suite on the Norwegian Sky for three whole days. I invited my friend Bev to go along.

There was a person to walk us on to the ship. He took us to our room two hours early to drop our bags. Then he escorted us to a private dining room for an exclusive lunch – only others who booked Owner’s Suites or Penthouses were allowed.

When we returned to our cabin, there was complimentary champaigne and chocolate-covered strawberries. They stocked our private bar with three bottles of booze that we picked. We had a private hot tub on a bow-facing balcony that was easily as big as my living room.

Then there was the cocktail party where we met the Master of the ship. That is above the Captain, who was officially titled the Staff Captain, according to the org chart posted on Deck 6. He actually seemed offended when we stood to meet him. No one else did, but I figured it best to stand when meeting someone who can either marry you or hang you, not that there was call to do either.

Our concierge, Virginia, called us each evening to see if we wanted to book one of the specialty restaurants. There are monitors around the ship to show which ones are filling up. I finally realized that, if you are in an Owner’s Suite, it doesn’t matter. You go wherever you want to go.

When we went to the show, Virginia met us and escorted us to our special seating.

We had a butler named Jeffery who overdid everything. We had an expresso machine in the cabin. And a computer, of course. The bed had memory-foam.

The morning we left, we had breakfast again in the exclusive restaurant and Virginia escorted us around the lines to disembark.

Did it live up to my dreams?

You betcha.

Would I do it again?

Sure, but wait till you see the next generation of ships. They will make us nostalgic about the “small” ships like the Norwegian Sky that are larger than the SS Norway.

Kick the tires and light the fires

Don Ramon is opening on Clematis Street.

I pumped up the tires and took out my baby recumbent today for the first time since laying off cycling at the start of the summer from hell. The weather was cool, comfortable, and extremely welcomed after the hottest summer I can remember.

The Palm Beach Lake Trail has lost none of its charm since last I rode it. It still is a car free ride through manicured foliage past homes nobody I know can afford. Christmas lights were going up on the house just east of the docks at the north end of the trail. There are either new buoys in the inlet, or old ones I don’t remember that have been repainted.

John F. Kennedy’s presidential yacht, the Honey Fitz, is no longer docked at the first pier north of the Flagler Memorial Bridge and there are only a handful of yachts along the trail until you reach the Sailfish Club.

On the way home, I saw the signs saying a new Don Ramon’s is going in at Clematis and Olive and will feature a 24-hour window. This is good news since Don Ramon’s is an old favorite for lots of former Palm Beach Post people. And a 24-hour window means you can feed very late at night if you can muster an armed guard to get you there.

So there you have it. The 2009-2010 bicycle season for me is now officially open. Note that I start it well before New Year’s Day so I won’t have to give anything away on this one. I won’t project a mileage figure for the season. I’ll also limit the math to 1/10ths of a mile instead of 1/100ths because my bicycle computers are off by as much as half a mile over a 12 mile course and I don’t want to do a Steinhoff with GPS machines and software. And I’ll tell you my route.

Good luck to all of you and remember, it is all about the ride.

Ride report:

#	Date	Route	Miles	Total
1	Nov. 17	Palm Beach Lake Trail	11.5	11.5
2	Nov. 18	Palm Beach Lake Trail	11.4	22.9

End of Contest

By viral request, that is all of you, I am ending the contest.

There is no way I can make 3,000 miles a year on a bicycle in South Florida. The summer is just too long and too hot.

The winner is Jan Norris.

Not only did she come closest to picking the day, but she also is the only one of you who needs lights.

I must say that I am disappointed. I thought I could make it.

But Norris was right. I couldn’t take the heat. Global warming and age, you know.

A couple of years ago I rode during the summer. I actually commuted to The Post from 10 miles out. A lot.

This year I just couldn’t do it.

Lazy is a word that comes to mind, but it isn’t that. Ask Steinhoff how many miles he put on this summer and he will measure it in light years but only because he rode his computer a gazillion times around the world and his bike around Lake Worth only a couple of times.

I didn’t expect to complete 3,000 miles and win the contest. I just didn’t think the summer would be so crushing. And, as far as I can tell, summer was over only a week or so ago.

I could still finish, but I would have to ride four hours a day for the rest of the year. That isn’t going to happen.

Instead, I’m going on a cruise. There will be bicycle simulators in the gym, which I will ignore. There will be Moet beside the hot tub and Rum Runners at the pool bar.

I’ll pump the tires and light the fires when I get back.

I’ll order Jan’s lights next week.

Thank you all for your interest, your comments, and your fly reports. And thank you mostly for being my friends.

Serendipity

Last weekend I went to Disney to meet my friend Beverly and some of her friends for diner. The next morning I went to the Magic Kingdom to check it out.

Some things don’t change, like the moon’s cycle around the earth, which is on display tonight.

I was surprised to find that the Magic Kingdom hasn’t changed either, except that Space Mountain is down for a rebuild.

Everything I saw was pretty much what I saw 15 years ago and, truth be told, 40 years ago when I went there for the first time.

I rode the “Small World” ride and it was exactly the same. I guess the magic still works for a seven-year-old.

New magic doesn’t alwasy work. I shot some stuff with my new Panasonic Lumix camera with its famed Leica lens and most of it came out blurred. I can’t explain it. Maybe some ice cream on the lens. I’ll have to look.

But I shot this protrait of Bev at a Halloween party and it reminds me of the stuff DDD used to shoot – that’s David Douglas Duncan to you – except he shot in black and white.

It is the artificial intelligence’s fault that it focused on someone behind her, but it is serendipity that rendered her softly as it should have.

I lost some nice shots, but I got this one, which is worth all the rest.

Feeling good about something

Greetings and be well, all of you.

For those of you who think my blog is getting negative because I have been riding petroleum powered machines instead of human powered machines, here is a post for you.

I found a nice little restaurant in Hobe Sound called Taste – only because I was riding one of those horrid petrol consuming machines.

The place has all the standard sandwiches and wraps, which I am sure are good. It also has meatloaf. An open faced sandwich on rye with grilled vegetables and, normally, mashed potatoes. They didn’t have any mashed potatoes today, they said, because they did an Octoberfest over the weekend and they were hammered.

I had a choice of regular fries or sweet potato fries. I took the regular.

The brown sauce atop the meat loaf takes four days to make, they said. I’ll leave it to someone more cullinary to comment on that, but it was quite nice. The fries were excellent. The grilled veggies, mostly squash, were a tasty conterpart.

If a restaurant offers meat loaf, I always order it. I figure it takes balls to put meatloaf on a menu – the ultimate comfort food, made by everyone’s mother.

The very best I have had was at the Kona Grill in City Place. They make it with Andouille sausage. Brewzzi in City Place has a meatloaf sandwich and an entre that is exceptional only because of its size.

Taste has a good meatloaf sandwich. I wouldn’t journey up there for it, I’d walk across the street to Kona Grill. But if I was up that way, I’d definitely go have it.

I was impressed enough that I will stop at Taste again and try something else.

It is a good motorcycle ride from West Palm Beach that lets you see that wild stuff north of Jupiter on the way home. It can be done in a few hours.

On a bicycle, it would take me a week.

Blackout

This is an answer to Scott Campbell, one of those people in life who is a friend even though he worked for Joe Lieberman.

Brittish cars. Powered by Lucas, prince of darkness. I remember them well.

I had an MG Midget that died half way between Cocoa and Titusville. When I got back to it, someone had stolen the seat belts. Can you imagine?

I had an MGA. I gave to a kid down the block because it wasn’t worth fixing. It lost it’s timing chain in the middle of Cape Canaveral, the town north of Cocoa Beach where I lived. Astronauts passed my disabled car in their Corvettes. We pushed it down to his house.

I also had an Alfa that was a rain trap. Water simply poured out of the glove box into the passenger seat when it rained. I traded it in and the next day when I went to pick up my new car, the salesman asked me if it leaked. It had rained the previous evening and there was enough water in it to raise salmon.

“Uh, did somebody leave the windows open,” I asked.

Ah, but the Miata. I kept mine for seven years and nothing ever went wrong with it. Nothing.

I now have a Prosche with a system that checks your tire pressure. Guess what was the first thing to go.

And wait till you hear this.

I was coming home from a road trip driving through Port St. Lucie with an 18-wheeler to my left and the thing decided to tell me it was past time for a certified Porsche maintenance.

Every gauge went from zero to red line, then the entire HUD went black. No RPM reading. No MPH reading. Everything went black.

Then it all came on.

It did this three times, then it left me, travelling at 70 mph with the biggest goddamn truck you have ever seen about 4 feet away, without cruise control or instruments.

Do you have any idea how freaked out I was?

I want to meet the guy that thought that if you wipe out all the instruments about three times, it will encourage people to take their car in to the dealer for an incredibly dollar-inflated tune-up.

I want to put him four feet away from a 20-ton truck doing 70 miles an hour and blank his instruments at about midnight when you didn’t know that could even happen.

Are you listening to this, Porsche?

Some 20-year-old shithead with a computer has made you worse that Lucas, Prince of Darkness.

At least, when British cars stopped working, they just stopped. You found the side of the road and then you found a taxi.

My God, you don’t stop the instruments when you are doing 70 and playing with a 20-ton truck

Old Lessons

Sometimes I forget to press the remote button that locks my car. I shouldn’t have to worry about it that much. The parking garage requires an electronic pass to get through the gate. Right?

A month ago, I got a ticket on my windshield. It was from the private security people who police my apartment complex and its parking lot.

The ticket said I should take more care to put things out of sight. A visor and a pair of sunglasses could be seen inside the car. This invites theft, the ticket said.

I, of course, tossed it without a second thought. Who in his right mind would bother to break into a car for a sweaty old visor and a drug store pair of sunglasses.

Yesterday I got in my car and found a talking book CD and an old receipt on the floor. Not normal.

I investigated.

My sweaty head band and my drug store glasses where exactly where they should be.

My Garmin GPS, stored in my glove box, was gone. That’s where the talking book CD and the old receipt came from – the glove box. Out of sight, mind you.

I immediately remembered the note.

When I mentioned this to a friend, here is the response I got.

“Why do you think they call the rent-a-cops?”

Thieves 1, rent-a-cops, 0. Me, out $200.

For years, I had a Mazda Miata. I never locked the thing on the theory that a pocket knife would do more damage to a cloth top than theft would damage anything I stored in the car. Consequently, I kept nothing in the car.

Turns out I was smarter in my youth.

My car still has a cloth top. I’ll buy a new Garmin, but I’ll keep it in the house until I need it.

And I’ll still be nice to the rent-a-cops, even though they could be the culprets.

Bottom line: If you first line of defense is cloth, or is run by somebody else, don’t trust it.

Helmet Cam

I just bought a HD helmet camera from Amazon for $300. Such stuff was not dreamed of even 10 years ago. It does an hour of HD video and audio on a 2 GB chip and recharges when you connect it to your computer. It weighs in at about four ounces. If you have a couple of twist ties you can mount it anywhere.

When I started in the journalism business, we filed stories on teletypes that communicated at 110 baud – about a character a second. All the photos had to be driven to the plant.

The first thing they taught you is that you have to have both sides. This is corporate for not getting sued. It has nothing to do with the facts.

Now we are in a position where we have to have a Republican to answer a Democrat on every issue.

Democrat: Everyone should have health care.

Republican: Yada, yada, some kind of lie about Stalin or something.

Here are the facts. Everyone should have health care. Everyone should have a job, unless they are retired, and everyone should have a home.

Nobody needs a yacht. Nobody needs a room in their house called a library if they get the books from Goodwill and don’t read any of them.

Nobody needs a shooting gallery in their home. Trust me, I know people who have them.

Nobody needs bathrooms they don’t visit. I know people who don’t even know how many bathrooms they have.

Can you imagine?

I grew up with one bathroom for four people. I watched my father fart on the way to it, and you better not be in line. He jumped it.

We can no longer afford the rich. We need a major tax on inheritance. Something like 90 percent.

We need the money. Can you imagine how much we will need when global warming kicks in? Katrina will look small.

Start thinking about this. It has to pass Congress and if you keep electing people from the Chamber of Commerce you are never going to get there.

It is real simple. They eat oysters and you die, or we decide to live.

What Say You, Dan Marino?

Watching football tonight?

There is an interesting story in The New Yorker this week that implies that football and boxing destroy the brains of the participants.

Researchers have collected brains from 50 football players and boxers and have examined them for damage typically associated with dementia and Alzheimers. All of them showed damage, but without signs of the diseases.

All of them is too many to disregard.

They also have instrumented helmets to show head impacts. Typically, football players suffer impacts to the head measuring between 60 g’s and 100 g’s several times per game and also during practices. This throws their brains around inside their skulls causing cumulative damage.

Bottom line: sports like football, boxing and wrestling cause the same kinds of damage as Alzheimers disease only a lot sooner.

This doesn’t seem to be altoghther surprising. After all, the object in boxing is to concuss your opponenet so that he looses consciousness.

The only cure seems to be don’t play these sports.

And the bottom line to that: it won’t happen as long as 50,000 people show up to cheer while college and pro teams batter each others brains out.

I’ve switched my allegiance back to baseball. You may like soccer.

If you stay with football, you are no better than a Roman – sacrificing human life for a bit of entertainment.