Thank you, armchair travel companions!

‘… isn’t that what travel is? A chance to reckon with what you want to see versus what you really do see, a chance to rethink what you thought you knew—as long as you give the place, wherever it is, the opportunity to work its spell on you. Oman gave me both. It wasn’t what I expected. But I kept my eyes open, even in the sandstorm, and in the end, I saw.’

from the Condé Nast Traveler article

‘Oman,’ by Hanya Yanagihara

Our guide, at the Grand Mosque, Muscat, Oman

I knew when I signed up for this cruise — over TWO years ago, April 29, 2016 — that I wanted to post photos and commentary as I went along so I would be connected to friends at home. Normally, on past trips, I would post photos with captions on Facebook and then re-create the entire post as an e-mail for those friends who were shy of social media. (What with Cambridge Analytica, those FB Luddites seem like the savvy ones now!)

I decided that, this time, I would do the ‘having a wonderful time’ communication work only once and the way to achieve that was with a blog. With help from my two techno whiz friends Anne and Priscilla, we created ‘Passepartout.’ It launched last November, a month before I embarked.

I sent email invitations to about 225 of my nearest and dearest. By the time I left home, around 160 had signed on. Thank you for coming onboard!

I’ve been home a week — and I got a brand-new subscriber two days ago! The Cruisecritic.com website has posted my blog address, and cruisers who read that site have subscribed — many are already signed up for a future Viking cruise, or are trying to decide if they will or not.

I do confess that when I got behind on posting — usually because we hit the literal ground running three or four days in a row — I felt deadline pressure. Which is silly because none of you knew exactly where I was on exactly what day, but I knew...

And when I ran up against the wall of wix.com glitches + a massive file + a miniscule shipboard WiFi capability, I would get emails asking Where are you? and Are you all right? I was always somewhere, and I was always all right. Thank you for asking! And thank you for all the Comments on the posts themselves.

You all seemed to enjoy the trip — and I was delighted to have you along! A number of you said you read my newest post with your morning coffee. Well, each morning, the first thing I did was crank up my email to see who had made a comment overnight!

My plan is to clean up my photo file — I think there are still 15,000 on my phone and even more on my laptop — and pull together a few ‘galleries’ on specific topics, with my very favorite shots from places and events. So there will be a few more PassepartoutPartTwos to come — stay tuned.

As I predicted last fall, it was ‘a helluva trip!’ And I’ve loved having you with me!