There are some amazing people here. Wander around looking for a poolside table for lunch and two people look up and say, “Join us.” They turn out to be a pair of characters with whom we share enormous common ground – in broadcasting, in travel, in life.
Go to Trivia at noon and be outclassed at every turn (an unfamiliar experience, I might add.) Meet two couples who’ve sailed around the world and several who’ve hit most of it. All full of stories and curiosity and an unfettered sense of adventure.
Spend a couple of hours on the private patio; wander upstairs to check out the gym and the spa then downstairs to the “book swap” to find an old favorite I would have rated “highly unlikely” to be along on a trip like this.
Then I met a Game of Thrones couple who had never heard of Hyperion and were thrilled when I went back to the give away and brought it to them. A perfect cruise reminder: never assume anything about anyone. Don’t.
I guess that’s true in general but out here on the sea it’s particularly so. Physical therapist or CEO, accountant or fashionista, nobody is predictable and almost everybody is as eager to meet you as you are to meet them. An openness to discovery – of new places, people, food, books and ideas dominates.
A lecture on tomorrow’s destination filled the large auditorium. It’s a kind of floating grad school dorm for grownups. In other words, as we move toward our first stop in Tangier in about eight hours, we’re a bunch of excited, curious, energetic travelers who also just happen to be living on a ship where this appeared at the foot of our bed tonight.
Yes, he’s a towel wearing Rick’s sunglasses and holding the info on our next stop in his paws. Goodnight for now, from Rick, me and the bunny.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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