Caribbean cruise

I went on a Western Caribbean cruise March 27-April 3.

The Star Princess took me to Princess Cays, the cruise line’s private island in the Bahamas, for beaching, swimming and snorkeling.

At Montego Bay, Jamaica, I took a 2-hour air-conditioned bus ride to Dunns River Falls, where I climbed over rocks through the center of cascading water. The Falls is more than 900 feet above sea level, and a human-chain ascent reduced the chances of bashing my head against the rocks.

At Grand Cayman, which hasn’t recovered fully from the hurricane that staggered it last September, I walked on a sandbar in ocean water to touch and inter-act with stingrays. Because I was directed to the wrong boat, I had to carry my belongings atop my head in chest-deep water to traverse the 120 feet from the wrong boat, and across the sandbar, to the right boat. The hurricane shoved treetop-high water onto Grand Cayman, unceremoniously plunking yachts in the midst of forests.

At Cozumel, Mexico, I tendered ashore to the mainland of the Yucatan peninsula to visit the Mayan ruins at Tulum, and learn how the Mayans came up with the binary code used in today’s computers, by creating the numeral zero. And how the Mayan calendar, eighteen 20-day months followed by a five-day festival, is off by two seconds per year. Our calendar, of course, is off by nearly six hours per year, which is why we had to invent leap year.

I met folks from England and Nigeria and a woman whose next stop will be to visit her friend Father McCann at Immaculate Heart Church in Cuyahoga Falls, a teen girl from Green, and an immigration security officer who is a Copley High graduate. And endured hundreds of teens from Ohio and Michigan who were on spring break from school.

And I ate and ate and ate on the Star Princess. Which probably explains why I went from using Hole No. 3 on my belt to Hole No. 2 and, at the end, somewhere between Hole No. 1 and Hole No. 2. Give me another four days and I would have had to buy a larger belt.

-- John Olesky, 1968-96 Beacon Journal newsroom, the final 16 as TV Editor