Day 7: Extended Family

Today again proved to be another pretty typical day. The ocean in the morning was very smooth, it had a nice glassy touch to it. This evening has been another story. There's a storm behind us so the winds have picked up considerably and we're staring to rock & roll again (thankfully just rock for now). Tomorrow or tomorrow night we should be entering the Straight of Gibraltar so we'll be very close to land and doing a semi-circle around Spain until reaching Barcelona.

I signed up for an "extended family" program that pairs a few undergrads with life-long learners or faculty to create a social group you can occasionally meet with and get to know. We had our first dinner together tonight and I met my "parents," Jim and Lesley. They are from Irvine and he is a professor of comparative politics while she is the communications coordinator for the voyage (the one writing the voyage blog). They're really friendly, great people and a valuable resource as they've sailed before both as faculty/staff and as parents. There's also a few other students who are my "siblings" and I'm looking forward to meeting with them for a little debrief after each of the ports.

We got the list of confirmed side trips today and since it's kind of long I'll post it in chunks starting with Barcelona:

On arrival Thursday, June 24 I'm doing a city tour/orientation of Barcelona. A few of the other Cal Lu people were going to try to find a cheap Flamenco that evening to go see. June 25 and 26 I'll be doing a trip to Madrid and Toledo. On Sunday the 27th we'll have the morning to check out Barcelona some more and I have two seminars for classes that evening, one on infectious disease and the other by Doctors Without Borders. It's shaping up to be a pretty good time. I'll post the other cities as we get closer but if you really must know I can email a tentative itinerary for each port.

That's all for now, we have another full day at sea tomorrow.