The Bahamas

Current Location: Nassau, Bahamas, the Sheraton Resort.

It's hard to believe that I've been here for less than 6 hours and I already feel like I have enough to write about.

My anxiety over making it from the airport to the hotel was much relieved when I met up with 3 fellow SASers (Semester at Sea-goers) at the Atlanta airport. A bunch of students had coordinated beforehand to wear yellow bandanas to find each other more easily and it worked! One other student was on the plane with me so we were able to catch a taxi together after our flight landed.

I'll skip through the boring process of check-in and finding the hotel room (confusing) and jump to my wandering about the hotel, mainly to check out the pool but also to begin the search for SASers. It didn't take too long for me to start finding more students. As our group began to grow, it became far easier to find each other as our hesitancies about asking random people if they were here for Semester at Sea wore off. Eventually a group of us hung out at the beach for a while and talked.

Most of the students were planning on heading to Senor Frogs, a local bar in town, but I was far more concerned about finding dinner, after making a bad decision not to grab food at the Atlanta airport. Not surprisingly, all the food at the resort was incredibly expensive. Eventually, I decided it was best I just stop at the cafe in the resort and try to grab a bite to eat before it got too late. I grabbed my laptop before I headed downstairs with the intention of starting this blog post and checking email as I ate. However, as soon as I sat down, two adults at the table next to me (who happened to have a pizza box I had been eying) asked if I was traveling with Semester at Sea. As it turned out, they were Lifelong Learners traveling as well (Lifelong Learners include non-traditional students and older passengers). I asked if I could join them and they said yes (and offered me their last piece of pizza, score!). Mike & Janelle introduced themselves, and we had a long conversation that jumped around from Mike's experience as a chemical engineer and the lectures he'd be giving on board to their daughter's time at CSU (a fellow Ram!) and plans for boarding the ship tomorrow. I really enjoyed our conversations and ended up arranging for fellow cab-mates for the trip to the pier.

-----UPDATE: I’ll cut off this blog post here because my plans to hang out at the resort/beach for the following day before my boarding time turned out dramatically different -----