Mossy Cottage Knits

Crooze

Now that I distracted you with my woeful tale about losing my yarn—slyly buying myself time to process my trip photos—more about the cruise. (Oh, and in answer to the oft-asked question, I think the yarn was from a company called “Fly Dyed.” Found it at a fiber fair or maybe one of our local all-purpose fairs. This is the only substantial link I could find online to anything Fly-Dyed related.)

The cruise was surreal, a world gone mad, truly a trip down the rabbit hole: A 936-foot, luxury cruise ship turned into a temporary utopia for 1,745 women—all lesbians or, more exactly, 1,742 lesbians, and three MTF transgenders, who are lesbians, which makes my head spin. No men except the crew (of 800, so maybe that's not exactly "no men"). And no children. None. Not one. Two dogs, yes. But no children. (Which was good because later on in the cruise, the poolside became decidedly clothing optional. Not for me, mind, but for the young, perky and lithe who could get away with that sort of thing.)

Even for me, the whole experience was so weird, so artificial, so hard to wrap my head around that, for the first 24 or 48 hours, whenever I saw two women holding hands, my first thought would be, “Look! Lesbians! There are lesbians on this cruise!” And my second thought would be, “D’oh.”

Not wanting to out anyone, here are the safest photos I can post of the passengers, taken at the sailing party.

Looking down on the Lido deck:

Looking up from the Lido deck:

(Information about why a Lido deck is called that, for those who crave trivia as I do.)

Did I fall in love? Yes, but only with this fine lady:

Did I have a shipboard romance? No, unless you count one sloppy, drawled, “I luuuuuuv you soooooo much” and a badly aimed kiss from a very drunk and very high woman with whom I occasionally crossed paths. The operative words here are “drunk” and “high.” I paid her no never mind.

I did, however, fall completely “in awe” of one woman, and you would have, too, whatever your personal leanings. The first day at the hotel, in a general social chat-group at the bar, I met a woman in a wheelchair. I was drawn to her by an easy, ever-present smile, a friendly yet slightly shy look to her face, a sparkle in her eye, and a way of being so comfortable with her chair, even proudly showing off its high-tech features, that you soon stopped seeing it.

I made some naïve assumptions about why she was in the chair: an accident, degenerative disease, recent surgery. I soon learned, however, that this friendly, warm, self-confident woman, this mother of two grown men, was in fact an Iraq vet whose torso had not so long ago been blown apart by a roadside bomb. She can barely eat because of the damage done to her internal organs, she had to have her breasts completely rebuilt because they were obliterated by the bomb, she will be in the wheelchair forever, she will require constant nursing care the rest of her life. And, yet, at night, in the nightclub, who was always in the middle of the dance floor, shimmying, laughing, flirting, gettin’ down?

Of the 1,745 women, she is the one I will remember forever—the one who, for me, put a face on the wounded female American soldier.

But there was, of course, more to the cruise than my silently worshipping at the feet of my newfound hero. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, there was, for example, towel origami.

A heffalump:

A doggie:

And what I think is supposed to be a monkey but looks more like a dead chicken:

Going from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, if there were any doubt that Holland America took this lesbian cruise seriously, take a gander at the urinals:

More in a couple of days because I am, if nothing else, a master of stretching out blog fodder.

Posted by Ryan at December 5, 2008 04:30 PM