Dateline May 1, 2016, Crossing the Atlantic, Tampa to Copenhagen

We had been planning this one for the better part of a year, and the planning, we admit, was half the fun. On April 17th we set out on a ten week adventure. First the Norwegian Star out of Tampa for a transatlantic crossing to Copenhagen, then onward aboard the same ship through the Norwegian fjords and the Baltic, then four weeks by train through the great cities of Eastern Europe and Italy, and finally the Oceania Sirena out of Athens for a run across the Mediterranean toward Egypt and Israel. If sharing it nudges one couple sitting at home to try something like it, we will count the whole effort worthwhile.

Crossing the Atlantic, as we soon learned, is not for sissies.

We slipped out of Tampa under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, down around Key West and into the Florida Straits, bound for Bermuda. On the second day the captain told us we were sailing the Sargasso Sea, the only sea in the world bounded not by land but by ocean currents, hemmed in on every side by the great circling currents of the North Atlantic. We had never given the Sargasso a thought before; now we will not forget it.

Bermuda. On the fourth day we tied up at the old Navy dock. We had been to Bermuda once before for a couples golf tournament, so this time we simply took the ferry into Hamilton, caught up on email, and made a video birthday message for our grandson Collin. On the way back we passed the Oracle America's Cup team putting their racing boats through their paces. It was a quiet day, which was exactly what the next stretch of ocean would ask of us.

Ship life. Knowing the food would be plentiful and very good, we decided we had better move. Neither of us had done yoga before, but we took a class and kept at it every day aboard, and we tried TRX for the first time too, the straps that hang from the ceiling and turn your own weight against you.

Our trainers Andrea and Johann were patient with two beginners, and we promised ourselves we would keep it up through the fjords and the Baltic. The one exercise we never did master was the push away from the table. Then the weather found us. For a full day a low pressure system threw up steady waves of twenty-five to thirty feet, with a few that reached forty-five. One couple told us their waitress looked out at a wall of water from the sixth deck and screamed, then apologized and said she would have to report to her supervisor that she had screamed in front of her passengers. We rolled and pitched and rocked in our bed, Janice nursed a headache, and we came through without seasickness, which was more than many aboard could say.

The Azores. We were cleared ashore at Ponta Delgada, on Sao Miguel, at eight in the morning. Unless you are crossing the ocean, the Azores are not a place most travelers think to go, which is a shame. They are a territory of Portugal, nine volcanic islands some four hundred miles off the mainland, and Sao Miguel has more cows than people; the island sends roughly sixty percent of Portugal's milk to market. Tourism is catching up fast.

Our guide for the day was Josef, and he was everything his glowing reviews promised. He had come from Switzerland thirteen years earlier and built up a fleet of cars, only to watch each driver he trained go off and start his own service, which left him right back where he began, a one man, one car operation, telling the story on himself with a grin.

He drove us along the shore to Sete Cidades, a great volcanic crater all but filled by twin lakes, one azure blue and the other a soft gray green, with steep walls rising around them. We stopped in the little town for coffee and then climbed to the rim for the view at the top of this post. The next stop was the hot springs, a quarter mile walk in to find them steaming and natural among the green.

What made the day with Josef special was his eye for the hidden corners. Where the tour buses clustered, he knew a quiet pull off with the same view and none of the crowd. The best of it came at Lagoa do Fogo. We wound up the mountain into fog so thick we could barely see the road, and when we reached the overlook there was nothing to see at all.

Josef told us to wait, that the wind might clear it. In five or ten minutes the cloud lifted off the water like a curtain, and there was the lake.

On the way down we stopped to watch a few men fishing for their supper from the cliffs above the surf.

By afternoon we were back aboard and pointed toward Copenhagen.

The White Cliffs of Dover. As we came up the English Channel the captain gathered us with the story of the cliffs. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, he said, Britain was joined to the continent until an enormous flood, a vast lake of meltwater bursting through a natural chalk dam, gouged out the Channel in one violent stroke and made Britain an island for good. Whatever the geology, the white wall of Dover in the morning light was worth standing on deck for.

Ferries crossed back and forth below, running the narrow water between England and France.

Into Copenhagen. We landed in Copenhagen and took stock of thirteen days at sea. The crossing had given us more than miles; it had given us friends. We fell in with three couples we expect to know for a long time: Joe and Laura Salzsieder from the Tampa area, Sally Brown and Phillip Ross from Burlingame, California, and Rudy and Vicki Gutierrez from Los Angeles.

Copenhagen, though, was only the doorstep. The Norwegian Star was about to turn north for the fjords, and that is where we will pick up next.