The Sky Princess

Just to warn you, this will NOT be a “standard mature adult travel blog post that cycling enthusiasts everywhere will enjoy.” It’s going to start out like that, but we are going to touch on a number of things. But it will start with me telling you about my very first ocean cruise. It was from Princess Cruises, the line that gave us the ship “Pacific Princess,” the famed “Love Boat” of the eponymous series from the 70s and 80s. My cruise was quite an adventure, but I’m not sure I’d call it a love boat. My ship was the Sky Princess, and I think that fit the nature of the journey much better.

In my last post I mentioned that it would be a better idea to describe my clothing and packing choices in a following entry. I’m going to show my cycling tour wardrobe here. There is a method to this madness, so bear with me.

Hopefully you can tell from the above that I have absolutely no “normal” clothing at all. I mean, there are lots of cool guys out there who wear rompers, but they tend to be beach combers and metrosexual types you might find walking around sunny Santa Monica. Retired Army vets wearing 24th Infantry Division hats normally won’t be found in that sort of thing. Dudes in spandex swimsuits aren’t even that common anymore on the beaches of Italy. Everything I have is designed to be worn on the bike, or the beach, or just around my room while doing laundry. And all of it, every piece, is designed to save space. As such, everything is going to be rather form-fitting. Keep this in mind, as it would be a source of great fun at the beginning of this trip, but would cause me to hit some bumps along the way.

We start with one cycling shorts/long sleeve outfit.

We we add two cycling shorts/short sleeve outfits. The Arizona rising sun cycling Jersey has the logo of Landis Cycling in North Scottsdale. While I was in LA I wore an Arizona cycling jersey from Flat Tire Bikes, but it was heavily worn and had to be replaced.

To this we add Rapha Los Angeles bib tights and a Rapha Los Angeles goretex cycling jacket. These were pretty much my cycling clothes as of the cruise. Now I have planned to do a lot of beach combing in Greece, so I added a swimsuit.

On days I wasn’t on the bike, I wanted something I could walk around town in, but whatever I would wear would have to be super compact.

This romper served as the closest thing I would be able to manage to normal civilian street wear. Now for the funniest of my fashion choices.

This outfit is basically for hanging around hotel rooms or out in the middle of nowhere. The top consists of an under armor undershirt. The bottom is pretty ingenious, though.

The bottom shorts unsnap into a skirt. This makes them into underwear that can be worn over and over because it doesn’t touch my crotch. So imagine, I am riding and riding, camping as I go, days without a shower, and everything gets dirty. I finally get to a laundromat. I pop on the skirt shorts and launder everything except the skirt shorts, then do the drill all over again. The skirt shorts are meant to be worn while everything else is getting laundered. So it’s inconvenient to get the skirt shorts laundered themselves. I may need to wear them several times before I get a chance to wash them. But they are underwear. I, like most people, can wear a pair of pants a number of times before washing them, but wearing underwear over and over is icky. But since these just touch my hips, I feel more comfy and hygienic wearing them a few times.

Open-fingered and closed fingered gloves.

Some cheapie cycling glasses. They tend to break or get lost. I still have this set, but they are so scratched I think I am getting ready to switch them out.

Always ride with a helmet, folks. This one is a Trek solstice.

The Captain America kippah is my one piece of Judaica that I brought with me. Much to my dismay, I actually forgot to pack my super tiny Shabbat candle holder. It’s still at mom’s in Scottsdale. However, this time around I am thankful I don’t have to worry about tealight candles and lighters and all that. It was a kind of a hassle on my first big tour, and I haven’t carried it on any of my smaller state-wide tours.

If we add five pair of socks, you now have pictures of all the clothing items I left Arizona with. However, in Miami I did pick up a t-shirt.

This makes the swimsuit into something of another outfit, which gave me a little more variety on the cruise, which was going to be two weeks of no bicycling. And with that, you have everything I took on the cruise. Now this is a post about the cruise, but I committed here to talking about all my clothes on this trip, so there are a couple more things to add.

In Canterbury in the Unighted Kingdom I added a balaclava (or “neck gator”) to my cold weather attire. Then just one final item.

I added some long underwear leggings from an outdoorsy sporting goods store un Bruges. Kinda like their equivalent of REI or Urban Outfitters. This then summarizes everything I have to wear as of the time of this writing. However, remember, even the last two pictures were not available on the cruise. So only my cold weather bib tights covered my legs. Everything else was for sunny, warm weather. That said, now for a discussion of the flavoring of the ship.

Apparently the different cruise lines specialize in in catering to different crowds. For instance, Carnival Cruises specializes in younger crowds who want to blow off a lot of steam. On their ships you’ll find rock climbing and bumper cars. These won’t be part of a shore excursion, but they have them  ON THE SHIP. You don’t have to get off the boat to do that stuff. Virgin Cruises is a little racier. That’s more for couples fun, and in your stateroom you’ll find a complimentary bowl of condoms. Or at least you did until they found that the family market didn’t really appreciate it. Well, Princess Cruises specializes in old people. Their ships have huge theaters with shows you visit in evening suits and cocktail dresses, and there are tons of tai chi classes and first rate massage spas and the like.

There are a plethora of young and beautiful people on the ship, but they are generally going to be crew members, that is, your handsome fitness trainers and the beautiful dancers who will be entertaining you. Princess separates the crew into the lower decks below deck five, though, so you’ll only see them in their uniforms doing their jobs. And guys like me don’t dare talk to them except for strict business necessities because we just don’t need any sexual harassment accusations, which always come, no matter what.

The above, though, might give you an indication of social interactions for me on the ship. It didn’t take me long to get the hint that I was a bit famous due to walking around in my weird athletic clothes. People would say “hi” out of nowhere and start talking to me, and within seconds “you’re the bicycle guy” would come up. I actually built my daily schedule on the ship around what I had available to wear that day. I would hit the gym and do stationary bicycle three days and wear my cycling shorts all day. Then I’d wear my swimsuit and hang out all day in the jacuzzis and swimming pools. With my romper I would hang out in the bars. When I had my skimp suit I would take a day to get surreal in the cabin by myself. I would never be dressed like everybody else. People would come up to me like I was an animal in a zoo.

I was loving it. I met a huge number of people from all over the world. Old people can be a ton of fun, really. They have all their stories and different perspectives. They are also very, very unlikely to accuse a person of sexual harassment. At least that’s what made me feel so comfortable around them.

I mentioned in a previous post that I moved to East Hollywood and spent 2024 recuperating from the horror of exposure to California #MeToo inversexual pornstar culture while living in a co-op in Venice. Part of that recovery involved not talking to too many women. What few of them I did try to talk to were usually chicks I ran across through cycling and my Strava cycling app which includes a built-in chat messenger. I would generally send a text to somebody, and 1,000% of the time, every time, they would not respond, or they would respond with a sentence or two and then just mysteriously quit responding. I surmised that there must have been some kind of gossip slander going on based on people having read some of my tormented 2023 blog posts, getting some kind of negative impression, and gossiping about me. I really couldn’t fathom why everyone I came across would refuse to respond to me or would just instantly stop responding after a couple of introductory niceties. Anyway, the pattern began to develop in my life: chicks just don’t respond to electronic communications from Bailey. I could also get a vibe of a secondary pattern of: Californians just don’t respond to out of the blue texts from strangers. So not being focused on going to bars, partying, or looking for love, 2024 was a year of hanging out with the Second-Hand Lions of the Palos Verdes wing of my cycling club, a bunch of pretty cool old dudes, and Brad from the synagogue, an amazing guy in his late 70s.

So I really hadn’t talked to any women I wasn’t related to by blood for along time, and then at the end of what I would call a pretty decent laid-back year of bicycling and synagogue attendance, I went down to Mexico and endured a two-week onslaught by the forces of Satan with my mother at her place in Guadalajara. Wouldn’t you know it, that event just had to include a statement by a Lilith demon monster that I had never seen before accusing me of grooming my daughter for sex with a 39-year old man because I let my daughter use her cellphone during high school. Long story there, and I have some stuff to cover, and that whole event was just so disturbing to me I really can’t think about it. So I will just leave it at that. I got on that ship after not really talking to women for a long time and shortly before debarkation the forces of the infernal world rubbed some nasty salt in a very deep, very old wound.

So on the ship I definitely carried an aire of “are chicks okay to be around?” That the overwhelming majority of the ladies whose company I was keeping were well into their golden years was absolutely welcome to me and made for a tremendous good time for the majority of the cruise. I wish I had more pictures of the people I hung out with. I tend to feel awkward asking people I don’t know to take their picture, and in today’s world, a number of people really do feel awkward about being asked for their picture. I began to note that many of my Strava posts contained no pictures of anybody. Even me. I don’t really dig selfies. They are kind of self-aggrandizing, if you ask me. I could take a picture of a building, or I could take a picture of ME in front of a building. I prefer the former. Thus I have many photo albums on this trip that have very few pictures of me or others. So I started asking various waitresses and people people I was talking to for their picture, and some said “no.” But on the cruise I hadn’t quite yet started to feel the urge to artificially increase the number of people I have photographs of. So I was indeed talking to all kinds of people, but there isn’t really much record of it.

I do admit that I kept meeting new people and having the same kinds of conversations, and I did get a bit tired of giving the same story about myself. I was pleased to meet them, but I didn’t see myself hanging around with most of them after the cruise. There was a super cool young gay guy Kyne, who was a drag queen and a mathematician, but his British husband was so violently pro-Palestinian that things got awkward, and the gay community tends to come at religious guys like me with a lot of judgment, so that became a lot to overcome. There was also Jay and his wife Jean who was a politically conservative early-retired private pilot and world traveler who actually based out of the south east Texas thicket not too far from my dear aunt Esther. Unfortunately we all got too drunk one night and a conversation turned unexpectedly to the topic of swinging, and I woke up sober the next morning feeling awkward. There were a couple of instances of getting too drunk on that boat. I drank quite a bit on the trip I must say. Finally, there was this really amazing Christian guy Nathan, but every time I would bump into them the timing would be wrong. I was heading off to Santa Cruz on Tenerife on my bicycle while they were looking for a go cart because Nathan has a limp, for example. I got stressed at one point and hunted him down for a spiritual conversation only to find him entertaining a group of strangers, and I just couldn’t bare my soul as needed. Things like that. Just didn’t link up with him. Interestingly, I couldn’t find any Jews on the ship until finally getting to a synagogue service just before the voyage ended. To boot, I didn’t quite connect with any of them. I tended to know more about the language and service than a number of them, but not as much as others, and so “amount of Jewishness” was kind of a factor in causing me to want to know more about everyone before cozying up. I did tell my story to a few who were quite piqued, including one English lady named Charlotte, and surely would have made friends if time permitted.

So I met tons of people, but none of them really stuck to me. Then the unthinkable happened. A number of the restaurants on the ship will sit you down next to strangers, and I was sat by the crew next to this Polish blonde bombshell Karolina and her boyfriend José. Karolina was actually fairly smitten with me as far as I could tell. At one point, after I had given my usual introductory stories of military heroism and espionage and bicycling around the planet earth, she actually leaned into José and said enthusiastically, and obviously within my earshot, “I really like this guy!” At the time I was warmed all over. Perhaps a lady can come into my field of view without my death and destruction in her sights.

I had been contemplating how I would get down to Cyprus after Bonn. One of the things about this particular cycling tour I am doing is that I am traveling almost exclusively to countries that I have been to before. I have not been to Poland, though, and I know Poland has a rich Jewish and Nazi history. It’s the home of the Krakow Ghetto and Auschwitz and all that. I thought going to those places might be powerful for me to see. I also married a Russian and have tons of stories about the Czech Republic from my Infantry days stationed on the German side of the Iron Curtain two hours from Pilsen, and I lived some months in Serbia as a part of one of my previous treks to Israel. I would have loved to see the Polish take on Slavic and Eastern European culture. And this blonde Karolina was just adorable.

Her guy, however, had some serious issues as far as I could tell. He was a 50-something wealthy Latino businessman with a kind of Dezzie Arnez or Ricardo Montovan style. Very charming. But his behavior, and that of the two of them, turned bizarre.

The ship has an app that lets you find and befriend other passengers and text them. I sent him a friend request, and he didn’t answer it. Lots of people aren’t into phones on ships, though, and lots of people don’t text, so I didn’t think anything of it.

A day or two later, though, I was minding my own business on the top deck when Karolina shot out of nowhere in spandex and sports bra, fresh from the gym. We talked a bit and she told me she wanted to live in Switzerland, be free, etc. I mentioned that José was working in Miami, at which point she mentioned that she had just started dating him right before going on this cruise, and in fact she started dating him on a previous cruise where they met up in Buenos Aires. That struck me. She is telling her boyfriend “I really like this guy,” then comes up to me and basically indicates she has no attachment to her boyfriend.

Then still a day or so later I am actually up on the top deck late at night sitting by myself quite drunk after some saucing below, and she pops out of nowhere wearing this flight attendant outfit that had me mistaking her for one of the crew. I look her up and down astounded, finally recognizing that it was her and not one of the lovely dancer girls that would occasionally saunter through my field of view. She then poses for me like a model, smiling playfully, and out of nowhere José rushes up and literally grabs her by the arm and waist and drags her away while she is laughing. He won’t stop, and off they went. I yelled after them…ridiculously…”José…accept my friend request…!” And then just stared into the darkness and went back to my dizzy sitting before staggering to my stateroom.

Well, José did accept my friend request, and he was slow and terse in responses. I figured this flirty progressive European chick had a jealous latino boyfriend problem. Then something bizarre happened. I was sitting my myself in the cafeteria in the evening at one point. I was invited by a Chinese solo traveler lady to go to an evening show, but ducked out at the last minute because everyone was going in and out of the theater in evening wear and I was wearing my spandex swimsuit and a t-shirt, and at the last second I got self-conscious. I was trying to figure out where to go, what to do, make excuses, all that, when José and Karolina come out of nowhere, José in one of those suits with a kravat and Karolina in a floral sundress sporting a hairdo that must have taken hours to put together, the two of them looked so dynamite my jaw dropped like a man looking at the Star of India for the first time in person. That’s when José walked past me and put his hand on my upper thigh and squeezed it gently as he passed. I was then doubly shocked.

My impression completely changed. Instead of being a wild and free chick with a possessive boyfriend, maybe they were a swinger couple where the chick wants to bring a dude in for a threesome and she has to convince her boyfriend go go along? I mean, I did just have that weird conversation about swingers with Jay and Jean a few days before. I had no idea who these people were.

Remember, I am the Jewish gynophobe, and I had been on this cruise drinking too much for days. So when I got back to my stateroom I texted José that I was a Jew and only dated Jews and that I was not up for stealing his girlfriend or a threesome or whatever may have been going on. José reacted with venomous offense, and so I told the two of them to get lost, and I would let the crew know if they bothered me further.

The next day I got called in by the crew to be investigated. Yes. I did not talk to women for all of 2024, with the exception of getting accused of pimping my daughter, and then I go on this cruise and the only chick I talk to who was not seventy years old gets me put under investigation for saying I don’t want to have sex with anybody.

I’m not making this up! I’m going to show you the text conversation!

Now I do not have record of the officer of the deck pulling me into his office to investigate me. Who knows what sort of lies those two crazies told him about me? But, yes, the gynophobe who hasn’t talked to women in forever except to get told he is a pedophile daughter groomer really can get investigated by the crew for telling some weirdos that he doesn’t want to have sex with anybody. Lucky for me, the deck officer’s solution was the same as my initial suggestion. Unfriend everybody on the app, and if I see these two, make like they don’t exist. I was all too happy to comply.

Now I do a lot of thinking and writing about patterns and symbols from my interest in Kabbalah and Carl Jung’s ideas of acausal relationships and “synchronicity” as it is generally called. So I ask you, “what are the odds of this happening? Is there a purpose for it? Does it contain meaning?”

According to my analysis, Satan has been trying to drive me crazy ever since I got the idea to go to Israel. He will pull every trick he can to do it. There have been indications of this plan going way back. And notice José telling me “you need therapy!” The Lilith demon who accused me of pimping my daughter also demanded that I go to therapy. Now I am not saying that I am not crazy. But I am riding a bicycle across Europe for the second time. I have not died dodging any imaginary buses on the bike, nor have I died slamming into any buses that were invisible to me. Sure, my ability to work with technology is about the same as my 78-year old stepdad, but I will tell you, people around me can verify that electronics do genuinely act strangely around me. Yes, it is often traceable to some naturalistic circumstance like my not paying attention to some detail or some circumstance of being on a strange network in a foreign country, but again, what are the odds? Bailey’s phone never works. We all know this, even if we have different explanations as to why.

But now get this. And if you will have to do some legwork to verify this, but you can if you want. Ship routes and weather reports are out there somewhere, I’m sure. But alright. The final story.

So our ship was originally supposed to stop in Madeira, some Portuguese Islands in the Atlantic, and then at Casa Blanca in Morocco, and then La Coruña in northern Spain. However, an easterly heading low pressure system in the Atlantic forced us to take a more southerly course to stay south of some storms, so our first shore excursion was changed from Madeira to the Canary Islands. We had more or less great weather the whole trip up to that point. Then the investigation by the crew happened the day before the shore excursion in Morocco. This was the only excursion that I paid a huge amount of money for in order to get a phenomenal tour of Casa Blanca and Rabat. And phenomenal it was. The weather was incredible. But after that excursion, totally triggered by the Polish blonde and her Latino boyfriend, I decided that I was just going to stay in my cabin and not talk to anybody for the rest of the trip.

And that’s when fate took control of the ship. See, we had been taking a southerly course east to avoid the storm, but at some point we were just going to have to head north to Southampton no matter what. So after the brilliant day in Morocco, we headed north into the storm, and the weather was wretched for the rest of the trip. I was having a blast bobbing around in my cabin. But these old folks were having to strap themselves down. La Coruña was cancelled altogether. And we arrived in Southampton right on schedule.

So, just after the pornstars of Venice Beach triggered me and wrecked my soul in 2023, and I left the city on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, Los Angeles was inundated by floods. Just after the December soul destruction in Guadalajara when this demoness said I was pimping my daughter and told me to get therapy, all of which took place between 8 December and 17 December 2024, Los Angeles was wrecked by horrific fires.

Now the Torah talks about Noah being saved from the ancient flood in millennia past, and the New Testament says the future battle of Gog and Magog at the end of days will end in fire. The Mesoamericans also have legends about a past world that ended in floods and a future world that will be destroyed by fire.

It looks like I may have participated in my own little version of this pattern. My cruise toward Jerusalem involved the excursions of my tormentors being ruined by storms. And I left Los Angeles twice, once after a flood and once just before a fire.

Now, as usual, I am having all kinds of technological problems adding pictures and links today, so I am going to publish this post and then see what I can do to add some pictures and links  in days to come as I also chip away at my Gulf Coast bicycle tour post. I may have some final words of what I make of this at that time. But for now, enjoy this raw draft.