Sunsets, Sunrises, and Sad Goodbyes

I know that it's a little late for me to be entering something from the actual voyage, but I didn't realize until today that I never wrote anything about the trip back from Morocco!

I'm going to need a little help from my Journal....

OK.. nevermind then.... I guess I didn't have time to write about anything after Morocco....

So from memory:

We had a finals week, but it wasn't too bad. Definitely a lot easier than being at Pitt! Then again that may have been because I only had 3 classes AND they weren't engineering classes.

Tim, Nate, Rachel and I played a LOT of pinochle. I know that we definitely played 2 games to 1000 points. It was fun. There really wasn't much else to do, so we all congregated in rooms and on deck 7 and 6 to just enjoy the rest of the voyage and to play some cards. We had some pretty intense games!

August 19th was our Ambassadors Ball. We all got all dressed up and went down to deck 5 for the fancy meal and then to the union for the dance part. The food was OK, but the rest was really fun! We had a chance to get a photo with the captain and his wife (they are Croatian).

The 21st was spent packing. We had an entire day completely devoted to packing and getting our suitcases to a certain area of the ship. It was a very sad day.

On the 22nd, we were awoken at 5:30 by Dia. We were headed into Norfolk. We all had breakfast and then headed up to the deck to check out the coast of the US. My clearest memory from that day was the humidity. We were used to walking onto the deck at 8am and being a little chilly. Not the case at 5:30am in Virginia in the end of August. We were automatically hit by this wall of humidity. Kids retreated back to rooms to throw on shorts and tank tops and shed their sweatpants and sweatshirts we thought we would need.

The ship took forever to pull into the port and then departure times were delayed. Instead of getting off the ship by noon or 1, we didn't get to leave the ship until around 3 or 4. We screamed across the small section of water at our parents touring the war ship next the our ship. It was a long wait. Erin and I were the last to leave. We sat and watched the rest of our friends from the deck as they joined the throng of students through Norfolk's Port.

And that was the end of a pretty awesome voyage.