So go and eat your food now and enjoy it. Drink your wine and be happy. It is all right with God if you do these things. Wear nice clothes and make yourself look good. Enjoy life with the wife you love. Enjoy every day of your short life. God has given you this short life on earth—and it is all you have. So enjoy the work you have to do in this life.

Ecclesiastes 9:7-9

I don’t know if I mentioned we are heading out on a cruise. Into the Panama Canal. Stops at Half Moon Cay, Aruba, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Jamaica. Twelve days on Holland America’s Rotterdam (a.k.a. The S.S. Giant Floating Buffet).

Rebekah and I were talking about it Saturday evening, over an amazing dinner at Fort Lauderdale’s Olive and Sea Mediterranean restaurant here at the Hilton Marina where we are staying.

“We needed to do something specific and out of the ordinary to help mark my mum’s passing,” I said. “Now that she is gone, and dad last year, (as well as Geoff back in 2012), I am the only survivor of the family I grew up in.”

This feels pivotal in so many ways, and I am only just now beginning to grasp the weight of it all. Taking this trip is not just a whim of indulgence… it is a marker in time, a milestone, a means of processing, a kind of resetting, a recalibration, a shift in trajectory.

I don’t know what happens next. I just know that it is important that we take this moment, this elaborate pause, to take it all in.

So it seems fitting that we begin this latest adventure in this amazingly comfortable and ritzy setting!

It has been (Saturday) a really good day. The ride-share Lyft to the airport; comfortable flights to Atlanta and then South Floridan (thanks, Delta); checking in to this slightly out of our league hotel; savoring the unique flavors at the restaurant (grilled shrimp, coriander sauce, and feta pizza on freshly baked laffa bread, along with roasted cauliflower, burnt honey, and walnuts – complimented by a rich Cabernet and then crème brûlée with cappuccino for dessert).

This morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we will make our way over to the cruise terminal and check in. Here is the view in the morning light.

Stay tuned for more relaxing goodness, along with stories and photographs, and some introductions as we add five additional new countries to our travel resume.

Peace – I know I am already immersed in it – DEREK