This is from yesterday:

I have 4 cruises left including this one before getting home. 

Last week we had a charter cruise for a jewelry company called "Silpada", and it was a reward for the top 3% of the company. It was a small but really energetic and appreciative audience. The charter went to Cozumel and then to Key West. I was sick for all of Cozumel, but I got out in Key West. Key West is sort of like Newport with palm trees - it's very much more like the Atlantic Canada and New England ports than it is like the ports in the Caribbean. It has a small town feel with lots of old-school looking bars and pubs, as well as lots of tourist shops. It has quite a strong hippy flavour to it as well, with Bob Marley shops and tie-dye shirts abounding. 

This week takes us back to the kinds of crowds that we had before the busy christmas season, which is to say elderly. Old also means nice and appreciative, however, and our shows have been extremely well attended so far this week. After this week I have only one more regular five day and one more regular nine day cruise, as my last week here is the five-day rock charter.

I was asked just yesterday if I wanted to extend for one more nine day cruise. I was tempted to for the money, but after thinking about it and talking to a few people I decided not to. Extending for the extra cruise would mean I'd only have just over two weeks to spend back home before going on the next ship, rather than three and a half weeks. Also, I feel that I am read to be home again, and that extra nine days would be pushing the limit of my tolerance. I have loved this experience enormously, but I would like to leave it wanting more, not less. I have made some amazing friends on this ship and I hope to keep in contact with them in the future. I am feeling however that I have grown as much as I can from this ship and have become a little too comfortable here, and am no longer operating at all outside of my comfort zone. 

One of the greatest thing about being on this ship is being surrounded by people who don't think like I do. This has forced me to adapt, and it has made me notice new things about myself and how I act. Talking to people who don't think like yourself is incredibly refreshing because your thoughts all of a sudden gain new life in the eyes of others, and their input can be so different from what you would have come up with on your own that they can alter the course of your thinking, give you new lines of thought, or even fundamentally change the way you think. Not just the way people think has influenced me, but seeing different people's habits of day to day living and recreation have had an influence on me too. I am curious to find out how much of this, if indeed any, remains when I get home. An advantage to being away from home is that you are presented with a huge opportunity for uninhibited growth. The expectations and assumptions about yourself held by your friends and family can limit your potential to change as a person. If you take all of that away, you are left with nobody but yourself who knows the person that you think you are or have been in the past, leaving you free to define yourself as you so choose. 

Today has been a great day for music. A group of us sat in on our guitarist's solo set and played jazz as a quartet, something I haven't done much of at all since being here, and it was a lot of fun to play some jazz tunes and exercise my technique a little bit. After that we played two South Beach Rave shows, the second of which was really high energy and a lot of fun to perform. Tonight's been one of those good-feeling kind of nights, filled with slightly inebriated heart-felt good conversation about life and ships and everything else. These are the nights where I feel like I could do this forever, and when I really appreciate the full scope of how good I have it here. 

Tomorrow we're back in Barbados, and I'm thinking about hitting up a new beach and doing some snorkeling after our morning Neil Diamond rehearsal. Tomorrow night we have our Neil Diamond show, and then our Blues Night, shi which should be a grand old time.