They all marched down the center aisle of the salon to echoes of No Day but Today, the lovely song from Rent . They’re all young, and from more than 30 countries: engineers and stewards, restaurant staff and destination coordinators, Captain and cruise director, performers and crew.
It was the last night of the trip and we’d just left Petersburg, one of the world’s loveliest cities.
The drama of its grim history, combined with its beauty, left all of us with full hearts. The emotion and the fact that in the morning our floating dormitory would deposit us and all our worldly goods in Stockholm and end the magic journey left us vulnerable. Watching these young people, who had been so deeply involved in our lives, slammed us up and over the top, leaving nearly 300 of us moved and weepy.
For a bunch of worldly travelers, who’ among us had been everywhere from Antarctica to Burma to Saigon, we were pretty sappy. The staff would welcome new cruisers hours after we left, but this artful end to a perfect trip, so much like the last day of camp, really, was sentimental and perfect.
Published by
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.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
They all marched down the center aisle of the salon to echoes of No Day but Today, the lovely song from Rent . They’re all young, and from more than 30 countries: engineers and stewards, restaurant staff and destination coordinators, Captain and cruise director, performers and crew.
The drama of its grim history, combined with its beauty, left all of us with full hearts. The emotion and the fact that in the morning our floating dormitory would deposit us and all our worldly goods in Stockholm and end the magic journey left us vulnerable. Watching these young people, who had been so deeply involved in our lives, slammed us up and over the top, leaving nearly 300 of us moved and weepy.