#ionic sea

Ionic dawn

My wife has suffered from multiple sclerosis (MS) for over 15 years. Thanks to good medication management, a mindful lifestyle, a lot of sports and a fantastic physiotherapist, she was able to not only stabilize the course of the disease, but even improve it. She was also lucky that her illness didn't take the serious course it usually does for others. However, this illness still affects the way we travel. You have to plan trips with lots of opportunities for breaks. Traveling by ship is ideal: you are taken from A to B while sleeping - quite stress-free. Over the years we have also gone through a learning process in which the general boundaries have been constantly expanded. We now know that a 2-weeks, well-planned tour will push her body to the limit of stress, but she can definitely „survive“ such a trip.

Our first cruise was deliberately on a smaller ship because we are not big fans of crowds. We didn't want any rigid etiquette when it came to dining, but wanted to take a more „relaxed approach“ - so we chose an organizer who offered buffet restaurants on the ship. Most cruise lines celebrate abundance when it comes to food. An Asian service worker once shouted the following to the crowd streaming in as the restaurant opened: “Attack!” One wonders what kind of human image these people take with them from us when they return to their home countries. Wherever large crowds gather, the different patterns of human behavior can be observed quite well. This is often not particularly flattering for our species when egoism and vanity come to the fore. We have now gone on 5 cruises and are realizing more and more that this way of traveling is not necessarily the right thing for us. It‘s over for now.

-Simplicius Simplicissimus

Itineraries (Reisrouten):

Cruise 1 - Norway: Kiel - Bergen - Sognefjord (Flam/Laerdal) - Stavanger - Oslo - Kiel

Cruise 2 - Baltic Sea: Warnemunde - Tallinn - St. Petersburg - Helsinki - Stockholm - Warnemunde

Cruise 3 - Canada: Montreal - Quebec - Saguenay - Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown) - Nova Scotia (Fort Louisbourg/Halifax) - Newfoundland (St. John‘s) - Havre St. Pierre - Montreal

Cruise 4 - Ionian/Aegean Sea: Corfu - Crete - Santorini - Kusadasi (Ephesus) - Athens - Corfu

Head First

“Como si dice ‘sí’ in spagnolo?”

“Sí.”

“No, peró como si dice ‘sí’.”

“Sí.”

This goes on a few rounds before before it finally sticks that the Italians and the Spaniards share the word for ‘yes’. Then the kids ask me to count to 10 in Spanish, forward and backward, and they are delighted to find the linguistic similarities extend to numbers as well. 

All of this would be fine if we weren’t 30 feet up on a jagged rock with the Ionian Sea churning an opal froth below us. We first spotted the outcrop over lunch at Jónico, a cliff-side restaurant 10 minutes outside Syracuse’s old city. We ate calamari and pasta with anchovies and watched Sicily’s leanest bodies sun themselves into impossibly dark shades on the private terrace below us. Eventually, when the white wine took hold, the talk turned to that large object rising out from the sea beyond. Challenges were accepted.

By the time I finally swim over, I’m not exactly eager to take the plunge, so my strategy is to get on and off as quickly as possible. But Sicilian kids are a curious bunch, so before I can jump, we discuss Balotelli and FC Barca, the pasta scene in New York, a few of the curvy Italian women sunning themselves in the distance, and, finally, how I plan to leap off this rock. “Di testa! Di testa!” I don’t know, I say, it’s a long way to dive head first and I’ve got this feeling that these kids are icing me in the hopes that I flub it.

The questions and encouragements are still flying when I finally step up to the highest point on the rock, wave ciao and open my arms to the sea. Volo dell’angelo they call it in Italian—angel dive—and I feel like I might have stuck it.

But when I surface, there is no cheering or high-fiving or screaming si! si!  in Italiañol. No, the kids are pointing to another cliff, twice as high as the one I just threw myself from. “No, we want you to dive off that rock.”