You might be asking yourselves why I waited so long to do the last
few days. I decided to lump the last few days in to one email at the
end for 2 reasons. The captain informed us that to this day we had spent
about $400 in email costs and I also thought that some of the excitement
that was available to all of you on the first 10 days might get a little
boring on the second crossing. I was able to negotiate a lower price
on the emails when I showed the captain what I had paid on the Pusan
Senator and therefore I only had to pay $100 for the emails I had done
to date. I couldn’t think of anything that was exciting enough
to pay another $100 so I decided to stop and do a final email when we
got home.
We are home and after 40 days it is a nice feeling even though it was
a stupendous trip.
We will miss our nightly conversations that we had with Stefan Reindl
during the last 10 days and this first picture is of him and is how
we saw him nightly. The discussions were truly bridge building experiences
and we thoroughly enjoyed the fellowship and friendship that developed
over the 10 day period.
The next picture is of the lighthouse on one of the Channel Islands
and it was our first land sighting as we got close to the West Coast.
I decided to see if my Cell phone worked and I found that I had one
message on it from Morrie Knox. I called Morrie and to make sure that
I did not loose him I walked out on deck and the most exciting thing
happened just at that moment.
I was looking at the water and it was churning and I noticed there
were hundreds of dolphins jumping in the air and back into the water.
The movie which we have sent along with this email was our trying to
capture a most exhilarating moment. I thanked Morrie for his expertise
in trying to arrange a real District 5170 Welcome to the West Coast
(QuickTime movie is available by
clicking here. Please note that the file is over 6 megabytes and requires
the
QuickTime plugin).
We had not seen this many fish jumping out and into the water ever in
all of our sea travels. We were sure that someone from our District
had arranged this exceptional greeting. Morrie denied that he had anything
to do with it so a couple of days later I asked Tom Stoiber, our District
Website Advocate, if he had made the arrangements (joke). He laughed
but did not deny it so Cindy and I think he did it and we want to thank
him for a unique welcome home.
As we were making our slow approach (due to regulations) to Long Beach
Harbor we got word from the Harbor Master that the Berth our ship was
scheduled for was occupied. We would have to wait until the next day
early in the morning to proceed to our Berth. Our ship would have to
anchor in the outer bay for the night.
We had dinner and we took a walk around the ship and when we got to
the front we saw this lone seagull sitting on the containers. We were
wishing that we could just sprout his wings and jump over to Long Beach
which we could easily see from the deck. Cindy and I used to live in
Long Beach so we could recognize the various neighborhoods as we looked
ashore and kept thinking about just slipping down the anchor chain (like
James Bond) and swimming in. Just one slight problem, 4 suitcases.
I did have an interesting memory as we were standing on deck. I remembered
when I had been in the Navy 35 years ago. I was one of the Supply Officers
on the USS CAMDEN AOE-2. I was standing a quarter deck watch while we
were anchored in almost exactly the same spot. I remember thinking as
I was standing there for my 4 hour watch, ……..“What
will I be doing 35 years from now?”
We went to bed and it felt strange that the ship was not moving even
a little bit. The Captain had promised that maybe he would shift the
ballast tanks every few minutes during the night so that we could feel
like we were still on the open ocean (joke). The next morning after
breakfast we got to meet with the US Immigration and Customs Personnel.
This was our first entry to the US since 9/11 and so we knew it would
be different. It was ……..
Finally at about 10:30 we were off the ship and after all of our goodbyes
of the officers and crew we took the shuttle to the main gate were we
waited for AVIS to pick us up. We got to the AVIS office and we said
our goodbyes to Stefan as we gave him instructions on how to have the
most scenic route to Berkeley.
We ran a few errands in Los Angeles and got to find out, again, about
the bad LA traffic at 5PM. .
As we were driving home I mentioned to Cindy that I hoped we would
be able to salvage the little film of the entertaining dinner that we
had at the Inakaya Restaurant in Tokyo and since you see that it is
included you can see that our Computer Guru saved the day
(QuickTime movie is available by
clicking here. Please note that the file is over 6 megabytes and requires
the
QuickTime plugin). If you are
ever in Tokyo, Japan this is a very entertaining dinner experience and
should be done if at all possible.
We arrived at home after a very long day at 1:30 AM on the 19th of
June and we walked into the house. Our House Sitter was watching a movie
with our doggies and I got within 10 feet of the dogs before they even
realized we were home. One of them barked until she saw it was us and
she got so excited, she was wagging from head to tail non-stop for the
longest time.
Saying our final goodbye and our first hello from home
See you around the District and hopefully we will see many of you at
our first Cabinet Meeting on Wednesday July 7 at the Double Tree Hotel
starting at 6PM. That will be 1st meeting of our Celebrate Rotary by
Building Bridges Year. Our Celebration will begin with music and …..
Ron and Cindy Sekkel signing off of the Japan trip.
