Thursday, September 06, 2007

Last Night On The Ship

Our last night before landing in Florida, we had a pub night and a dance on the seventh deck. Right as the music was about to shut off around midnight, the sky opened up and it started pouring rain. Hundreds of us ripped of our shirts and started dancing in the rain. When the music shut off everybody just started yelling and jumping in the rain. We stayed out there for at least a half hour, in the rain, yelling at the top of our lungs. We were letting out all of the pent up energy from everything that we had been through in the past three months, things we did and didn’t understand, and the power of what we had just experienced. That kind of experience can never be fully expressed; the only way you can let it out is by jumping and screaming until you lose your voice.

After things settled down, I went and sat down alone on the back of the fifth deck. It was still raining and I was just watching the water go by, at 20 miles an hour, as it had for the last 100 days, all the way around the whole planet. This is the first time that the magnitude of the journey hit me. I had being greatly affected by every place I had been, but until the end, I had never taken a step back and looked at the trip as a whole. Picturing our planet floating in outer space, and knowing that I had traveled around the whole thing by boat, I realized how few people get to have that experience, and I realized how huge our planet really is.

The next day we landed in Florida, and just like that it was over.

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