“If music be the food of love, play on,” proclaims Duke Orsino in the opening line of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. That beautiful phrase popped into my head this morning but I need to modify it for my own purpose: “If travel is the food of life, journey onwards!” Travel is on my mind for several reasons: as a teacher, summer equals my best opportunity to travel; as a life-long enthusiast of travel, I constantly day-dream about my next trip; and as one of my travel plans has just been dashed, the gaping absence demands a replacement.
The plan that I must relinquish involved Cuba. For most of my life, an American citizen had virtually no chance to visit Cuba, but, for the past few years, that opportunity opened up. A friend and I had planned a cruise in November that included several days in Cuba, with different ports of call, along with a few other Caribbean destinations. Current political tensions, which we need not discuss here, have caused a cloud to hang over the American traveler's plan to visit that island nation, and now it's official—for cruise ships, anyway. An embargo means that the cruise lines must pull Cuba from their itineraries.
Living in a beautiful part of the States, blissfully located near the Caribbean, means that I have seen quite a few Caribbean islands, and while I have not explored everything the region has to offer, I don't want to take the cruise if Cuba is not amongst the ports of call, nor does my friend. Nature and the traveler's soul indeed abhor a vacuum, so with the news of the Cuba cancellation comes new planning. First: cancel my sailing on that cruise (full refund of the deposit, of course). Second: where to go? I love cruising—it's a floating retreat, and I find cruises nurturing to my soul as well as to my creativity. A repositioning cruise across the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps? A trip to a part of the world where I have not yet visited: South America, maybe? Part of the joy of travel is the speculative visions that occur whilst making decisions about, and then planning for, the trip.
