Underway!

Greeting from just offshore of Ensenada, Mexico. The ship left the dock three hours ago and we are currently motoring towards Hilo, Hawaii in five meter seas, projected to go up to seven meters over the next twelve hours. The ship handles the motion pretty well, but there are definitely folks who are having trouble with the motion. Tomorrow is student orientation and hopefully stomachs will begin to settle down.

We've been pretty busy over the last couple of days. Following a half day of orientation in San Diego, the faculty and staff boarded the ship two days ago. The last couple of days has been filled with meetings, orientations, getting lost trying to get from one of the two dining rooms to the "Union" - a 350 seat auditorium, to the faculty lounge and then back to my stateroom. Additionally, the vessel has nine classrooms, a fitness/wellness center, a coffee bar, a library with thousands of books and a computer lab with 20 computers. For those two days the ship seemed huge. It seems a great deal smaller now that we've taken on 640 students and 35 "Lifelong" learners - adults who are traveling with us and taking classes. The line for dinner was quite a bit longer than what we saw for our first two days.

We were actually alongside in Mexico all day yesterday, but between meetings and class prep work, I (and most of the other Faculty/Staff) didn't get off the ship. Today, following some meetings in the morning I decided to slip off the ship while students were getting onboard and settled in. I had Mexican Pesos left over from my last research trip two summers ago, and I figured I could go buy some snacks. After fifteen years of doing research in Baja, I didn't need to buy any souvenirs!

As I began to walk off the ship, I had to step aside to allow a group that was coming aboard. "Who was it?" you might ask, why none other than His Holiness, Archbishop Desmond Tutu who will be on board with us from here to Cape Town South Africa. I couldn't believe that I was shaking the hand of a man I had read so much about during South Africa's troubles so many years ago. He is a charming, gentle man and I'm really looking forward to hearing him speak. Incredible.

Tomorrow is a day filled with student orientation lectures. I have the day mostly to do prep work before the first day of classes which starts on Friday. We have no weekends at sea, but instead we have an "A" day and a "B" day each day we are at sea. We will have A1, B1, A2, B2 from Friday to Monday and then we are in Hawaii for two days. When we depart, the next day will be A3 and so on… The schedule will take some getting used to.

I apologize for the fact that I won't be publishing pictures anymore. We have a very narrow bandwidth on the ship and sometimes have to try several times just to get an internet connection. Without dragging a very long wire, we communicate with the interwebs via satellite, which puts us at 1990 speeds. How primitive huh? Big files are impossible and in fact the ship blocks sites like Skype as they would cripple the whole system. I may try to get some pictures up if I can find internet cafes in foreign ports, but frankly I'll probably choose instead to head off and have fun rather than playing on computers. Instead, I'll likely put together some sort of online album when I get back to the United States. I'm still a bit of a novice to this whole social media thing…. More to follow!