I woke up this morning when the ship stopped moving on the waves, the stillness being sudden enough to startle me out of sleep. It was nice just to notice something and not be expected to do anything about it. Maybe, in the end, that is what this sort of vacation is all about. As we rolled out of bed and showered (no yoga today), the Navigator sailed slowly into Bermuda’s calm harbor, where it docked at precisely nine a.m. On the shore, a black man in the garb of a colonial town crier rang a bell and screamed that we were welcome in Bermuda, and especially welcome if we brought our wallets and contributed to the local economy. Not much of a danger of that with us, I’m afraid. In Hamilton, the main city in Bermuda, Rob bought a pair of cheap cufflinks, and we had a scone at a crowded café. We peeked into two bookstores and a stationery store without buying anything, and breezed through the tiny National Gallery, which was free. I don’t know if there’s much to see here, but the guidebook lists shopping as the main attraction, even above the beaches. There could be a lot that I’ve missed: the sun is so bright that I can’t look directly at anything, and the heat and humidity are so bad that my glasses lenses are continually fogged over. Even my camera lens fogged when I tried to take a photo of the harbor. After just a short excursion, we returned to the ship for lunch and a nap.

During an afternoon hike through Hamilton, which is only one square mile, we quickly toured the old fort (a remnant of the American Revolutionary War, when the British stationed troops here). After that, we’d seen just about everything there was to see in the city proper and, each of us drowning in his own perspiration, we headed back for the boat once again.

We had dinner with some of our new performing friends and afterwards watched their show. There were a lot of medleys, and I’m not a fan of medleys: if I like a song, I want to hear the whole thing, and if I don’t like it, I don’t want to hear even a note of it. Either way, medleys are a lose-lose proposition in my book, but they knew their audience, and the cruise-ship blue hairs ate it up. After the show we went in search of a lounge for some drinks and bitchy gay conversation, and then bed.