Smiling Kodiak Takes a Cruise

By Drew Grant

There’s much to be said for cruising, not that Smiling Kodiak has ever said any of it. To see the Greek Islands in a short time, he discovers having a boat helps.

As an American, Smiling Kodiak knows how to squeeze too much into a short vacation. A Mediterranean cruise is a marvel of efficiency, like having a mobile floating second-rate Las Vegas casino hotel magically deliver you to a new world every morning. The disadvantage is that you wake up in a mobile floating second-rate Las Vegas casino hotel.

In Smiling Kodiak Takes a Cruise, Smiling Kodiak leaves his Australian home to experience the wonders of the Middle East, Rome, the Greek Islands, and Turkey — with 3,500 other passengers expecting the time of their lives. As with casinos, there will be more losers than winners.

Smiling Kodiak Takes a Cruise is no guidebook. It provides insights and anecdotes that you may find hilarious, shocking, offensive, poignant, bizarre – perhaps all of the above. But travel isn’t about where you go or how you get there, it’s about what unfolds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781942498018

Book preview

Drew Grant

Smiling Kodiak

Takes A Cruise

Copyright © 2014 by Zingara Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-942498-01-8 (EPUB)

Cover design by Zingara Press, Inc.

Book design and production by Zingara Press, Inc.

Editing by Tracey Palmer, Palmer Communications for Zingara Press, Inc.

Table of Contents

The Itinerary

1 It’ll be great if they ever finish it.

2 Only Mad Frogs and American-Australians...

3 The Genesis of Hide & Seek

4 Lost in Eternity City

5 La Dolce Vita

6 Miss America

7 The Straights of Messina

8 Chardonnay Socialists & Capitalist Democracy in Athens

9 Solstice on the Equinox

10 On The Rhodes

11 Peoria, the New Atlantis

12 We Have a Winner!

13 A Cruise?!? Really?!?

14 Caprices in Capri, Nostalgia in Naples

15 You Wanna Pisa me?!?

16 Quattro Out of Cinque Ain’t Cattivo

17 All good things must end, badly

The Itinerary

1

It’ll be great if they ever finish it.

How many times have you thought that? I am sure it is a sentiment common to many a first-time visitor to Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Yet I kept wondering why they ever started in the first place. This is a climate that makes Australia seem hospitable to human habitation.

Blurry. Everything was blurry. First I thought I was jet lagged and tired. Then I thought the bus windows were dirty. Then, off the bus, I thought it was foggy. No, it must be the omnipresent construction throwing dust in the air. In the end I found it was just a dust storm. And a minor one at that.

Humans occupy the strangest places. Florida remains a singularly inexplicable example. But it is even difficult to understand why one would inhabit a place as wonderful as Montreal, given the winters. But there it is. They adapt.

Every time I visit Montreal in winter I am sorely tempted to adapt as the locals do by purchasing a full-length fur coat, animals be damned. Yet before I get to the humanitarian arguments regarding the treatment of farmed coyotes, I see the price tag, and come to my senses. I want to retire before, say, death, and full-length coyote coats are neither a wise investment nor an item of much utility in Australia.

In comparison, they’ve