Cruise Wardrobe Capsule

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

~ Mark Twain

With only 30-some days till we board the Queen Mary 2, it's time to get serious about packing. At least in my head. I really need to take 3 different wardrobes on this cruise--daytime & excursion wear, smart attire for evenings, and formal for Gala Nights. There are a few themed nights. Here's my flapper costume for the Roaring Twenties evening!

Fortunately, I'm getting a chance to pack a daytime wear wardrobe this week. We're taking a quick camping trip to northern Iowa for my DH's family reunion. I'll also need to take something to wear for my brother-in-law Wayne's interment.

We lost him in May and made a sad trip through the floods on I-29 to South Dakota for his funeral. His ashes are being laid to rest at my DH's home church, in a charming little Lutheran graveyard surrounded by farm land and tall pines.

Then the DH's sister, Linda is preaching on Sunday so we'll need to be presentable for that service.

I've come up with a 14 item wardrobe capsule that'll fit neatly into my camper's closet:

Pants--Black, Navy, white capris, Jeans

Tops—Black tank, navy tank, white tank, blue print tunic, teal tunic, multi-print sharkbite tank

Toppers—Salmon sweater, olive sweater, black cardigan, black & white kimono

I have certain outfits in mind, but the point of a well-planned wardrobe capsule is its versatility. Each piece works with more than one other. So, just for grins, I started tallying up all the different combinations I could make of my 14 pieces. I quit when I hit 41!

Guess it'll do for 6 days in a camper.

I also promised, as a lady of a certain size, to share a bit of my fashion sense. (Even as I write that, I have to giggle. "My," "fashion", and "sense" should probably never be combined in a sentence.) But anyway, here goes:

1. Monochromatic Dressing--Nothing makes me feel more comfortable than a head-to-toe solid color. It may not be true, but I think it makes me look taller, hence slimmer.   
2. Creating a V--If an outfit doesn't naturally have a V to draw the eye down and elongate my torso, I can create one with layering. I really like this because I've still got the monochromatic thing going on under the pop of color.
3. V necklines--As often as I can. It's supposed to make my short neck appear longer, and if the neckline is low enough to make the DH smile, well...my mom always told me to lead with my strengths.
4. 3/4 or longer sleeves--You may notice that I have a lot of tanks listed in the capsule above.  However, I NEVER wear a sleeveless top by itself. They always live under a layering piece. I've got zero problems with a daring decolletage, but no one except the DH sees my upper arms.
5. Capris, not shorts--No one needs to see my knees. And my capris need to fall below the widest part of my calves. In a light cotton or linen fabric, capris are actually cooler feeling than shorts to me.
6. Prints--This is always the Never-Never-Land of plus-sized fashion to me. Whenever I shop, I can't help but decide that designers have saved the most butt-ugly prints from being turned into table cloths in Hell by using them for their XXL line. That said, I do have a few print items in my wardrobe. If I pick a print, there cannot be even an inferred sense of a horizontal pattern to the riot of colors.  And I'm most comfortable if I can layer a solid piece over a print. For example, I wear the multi-print shark-bite hem tank listed above with a cardigan. The long tank flirts out under the shorter sweater and a thin line of print in the cardigan's opening draws the eye down in front. 

I'll add black sandals, brown sandals and a pair of tennis shoes, my rain poncho and umbrella, and a few pieces of simple jewelry. And that'll take care of me for this trip.

Norway will be another story...

Classism Revisited

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

I've been lurking and occasionally posting on the Cruise Critic message boards, trying to learn more about Cunard since we've never sailed with them before. As I understand it, the style is very British, even to the point of having segregated classes of travel.

Craig & Vicki

According to our old tablemates from our 2018 WC, Craig and Vicki who were once bumped up to a Grills suite on Cunard, passengers in Princess or Queens Grill accommodations can avoid mingling with the hoi polloi  entirely if they wish. (Think Titanic...no wait. Not a good pre-cruise thought!)

One poster on a Cunard thread said something about how certain types of people regard others. It went sort of like this:

"Americans respect wealth. Brits respect class. Europeans bow to education..." 

I was struck by that observation. And I'm wishing it not to be true.

First, that most vile and taboo of subjects--money. Yes, Americans are driven. We do like to make money. We like to spend it. And we like to give it to others. I'm grateful to be able to do so. We've worked hard, but we've also been blessed. It is a gift to be able to bless others with a job or a donation.

But I don't look at other people and base my esteem of them on how much I think they have in the bank. That's the worst sort of shallowness.

Second, class distinctions. Since the US has never had a monarchy, we don't have a hereditary class system. True, some are born with more opportunities, some with more talent or innate intellect than others, but no one is touted as nobility simply because of an accident of birth. I guess you might equate our mania for celebrities or sports stars as a type of classism, and our politicians definitely consider themselves the ruling class, but as my dad says, "We all put our pants on one leg at a time."

Besides, using  the idea of class to separate from others rubs me wrong. I've always thought the person with real class is the one who makes everyone around them feel comfortable and welcome.

And then there's education...I'm all for it. To my mind, it's a great equalizer. An education is the surest way to lift oneself out of poverty. But I must confess I have run into educational snobbery. Once at a writers' conference, another attendee was waxing poetic about her cum laude degree from her alma mater, Brown University.  

Then she turned to me and asked where I'd gone to school. 

"University of Northern Iowa."  I neglected to add that I'd graduated summa cum laude AND without any debt because I'd worked my way through my degree. (At the risk of sounding smug, I think that omission was kinda classy of me!)       

Anyway, she blinked twice, and grandly announced, "Never heard of it!"

I had no response. My folks always taught me if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all. But I was thinking furiously. After all, of the two of us, I was the only writer whose work had been published by multiple NY houses. 

Frankly, the dirty little secret about education is that one university is very like another in respect to coursework. The idea that an Ivy League degree results in a better education is bogus. My DH finished his career with Google and was the only one of Google's thousands of employees to graduate with a Math degree from UNI. He held his own with the MIT and Stanford grads just fine. When he later took some courses at Harvard, he expected them to be tougher, but he aced them all handily.

The difference in universities, I'm sorry to admit, is in networking, which amounts to a type of classism. Heavy sigh...

Then there was another poster on the Cunard boards who were worried about whether they should even eat in the Main Dining Room because they had never gone to college. They were afraid they wouldn't be interesting to better educated travelers. 

Oh, for the love! There are some folks with multiple higher degrees who don't have the sense God gave a goose. And people who never graduated from high school who are well-read, well-spoken and know how to treat others. While education is valuable, it doesn't determine who you are or what you're worth! Comparing ourselves to others is the way of death.

Life comes from idea behind the quote  with which I started this post. If we could all see the image of God stamped on each other's features, there'd be no silliness over who's one up on  the other. 

Fear of Flying

"I like terra firma. The more firma, the less terra!"
George S. Kaufman

Actually, I'm a good flyer. No fear here. The DH worked for United, Republic, Piedmont & USAir at various times during the course of his IT career, so we logged a lot of non-revenue miles when the kids were little. We took home school field trips to DC and hit as many major aquariums as we could. The girls had passports from the time they were 6 and 8 so we could take them to Europe.

Then later, the DH qualified for his private pilot's license and we had a Cessna 182 for a while. We loved weaving through mountain passes and zipping over the plains. It was always an adventure. 

Flying is great. I can't wait to see the earth fall away as our long metal tube with wings takes to the skies. I'm not afraid to fly.

What I am afraid of is airline schedules and policies and, after the events of this morning, with good reason. 

The DH was doing a last minute look-see on all our reservations for our upcoming cruise to Norway:

Pre-flight Hotel in St. Louis: check  

Pre-cruise Hotel in NYC: check (We booked this through Cunard, so transfers to and from the airport, hotel & port are included before and after the cruise.)

Flight documents: ........ wait a minute . .... something's not.... hey! They can't do that!

When he pulled up our record locator to print out our flights from STL to NYC on American Airlines, the DH was shocked to find out we'd been bumped from first class to coach and the times of our flights had been changed so that our return flight left NYC a couple of minutes after noon--way too early to make the connection from a cruise ship that might possibly come to port late. 

Perhaps I should begin by saying we purchased fully refundable First Class tickets in January. We travel in that category because I need to have a plug in at my seat in case I run out of battery life for Herkimer (my portable O2 concentrator.) A plane at altitude is like being at 8000 ft of elevation. For most folks, that's no problem. My oxygen sats drop into the 70's without supplemental O2 in that situation. 

Believe me, folks, that is zero fun. Been there, done that, seriously don't want it to happen again. 

Making a connection is...a major slog.

So First Class is a must for us. And if it's available, so is a non-stop flight. We schlep along some extra medical equipment--two portable O2 concentrators (I have had a POC stop working without warning on me, so I travel with a spare) and a bi-pap machine--along with the regular carry-on stuff most folks have. So trying to make a connection between flights is a three ring circus.

A slow motion circus.

After spending over an hour with American's long-suffering customer service people, who couldn't offer a reasonable explanation for why the downgrades and changes had been made in our reservation, we cancelled the flights for a full refund. We were told to expect it to take 10 days before the credit shows up on our CC. Then the DH bought non-stop First Class flights on Delta that will do very nicely.

Provided they don't change things before we go too!

Anyway, the point of this post is: 

ALWAYS CHECK YOUR TRAVEL DOCUMENTS AHEAD OF TIME. EARLY & OFTEN!

PS. I suspect the grounding of American's fleet of 737's is behind the changes, and I can't fault the airline for that.What I do fault them for is that they did not notify us of the changes to our reservation. If the DH weren't a detail-oriented guy, we could've had a nasty surprise waiting for us at the airport. We might've even missed our flight. 

D-Day Remembered

Since yesterday was the 75th anniversary of D-Day, I thought I'd share a post from a previous blog of mine from 2013.

One of the fun things about traveling is meeting new people. On our cruise around the British Isles in 2013, we shared our dining experience each night with a pair of nonagenarians--George and Joe.

They'd been best friends since high school. They were the best man at each other's weddings and must have tied the knots tightly. Joe and his wife celebrated 60 years of marriage. George and his sweetheart were together for 65. They are both widowers now, but it takes a special kind of man to romance the same woman that long.

Now that their wives are gone, they still travel together, taking at least one cruise a year. Both are classical music buffs so we regularly ran into them at the frequent string quartet concerts.

They also both served their country with distinction during World War II. George was a pilot in the South Pacific. Joe fought in Europe and was a POW in Germany for a time.

After this terrible experience, it was a surprise to learn that he married a German girl. Joe and his wife met in the US after the war while she was an exchange student in college. Both their families said it would never last. Even now, he was hard-pressed to talk about her without his eyes glistening with unshed tears.

That kind of long-term commitment moves me. It speaks to the longing we all have for someone--just one--to accept all that we are and love us unreservedly. It's the epitome of romance. It also shows that former enemies can become the dearest of all through the transforming power of love.

Thank you, George & Joe for making our cruise experience richer.

And thank you to all our veterans and active service members and their families. I appreciate you and your sacrifice so very much.