Last night I juggled on stage for 1,000 people. This morning I surfed an artificial wave hundreds of miles from land. Hello from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
I’m writing this on Sunday evening after 8 straight days at sea on a transatlantic cruise ship. We dock in Lisbon, Portugal on Tuesday.
A cruise can be anything that you make of it. We wear pirate costumes on formal nights. We skip the shows, the shopping, the casinos, and the fake art auctions.
Instead, we opt into our own schedule and routine. Mostly, I’ve been reading. Sometimes for 10 hours each day.
These are the books I have finished in the past week at sea:
- Mission In a Bottle, by Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff
- When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
- Living With a SEAL, by Jesse Itzler
- Endurance, by Alfred Lansing
- Change Agent, by Daniel Suarez
- Holes, by Louis Sachar
- Unshakeable, by Tony Robbins
- Strawberry Girl, by Lois Lenski
What have we been doing?
My friend Tynan is my roommate and organizer of this adventure. He’s using his time on this cruise to write a new book. Our friend Jared Kleinert and his girlfriend Tara joined. We booked the cruise on CruiseSheet.com, a search engine that Tynan programmed to find opportune routes and great deals.
So the four of us work and read in peace, eat whenever we want, sleep well, work out, and make use of the ship amenities as much as we can, like the Flowrider surf wave machine and the Library. I didn’t touch the internet or my email for the first 5 days, and it felt great.
I plan to read more books during the remaining sea days. I’m excited to explore Lisbon. And I still want to get friends together to take a grand trans-Atlantic voyage. We are thinking a different route, like London to NYC on the Queen Mary 2, in 2018. Let me know if you’re interested.
