How International Travel is Prejudice Against Middle America

So many of my colleagues are starting blogs for their upcoming Semester at Sea voyages. My friend Dave did a blog when he sailed a couple of years ago and wrote every day. Every day. Considering all of the communication challenges that arise when sailing on an oceanliner around the world, it's really something of a technological miracle. Looking back at my first sad attempts to blog about my last voyage (I believe I posted about our first day on the ship which is before we even left Florida which I'm pretty sure is cheating.), I am a bit disappointed that I don't have the narratives to go along with the pictures. (I did, however, post a handful of my favorite pictures from each port from my last voyage. Oh, who am I kidding? That is still a sad attempt at blogging.) This time I am optimistic that I will keep up with it. At least a little bit. But instead of making empty promises about something that may or may not happen, let's begin with the voyage to the voyage thus far...

And for my first official Spring 2013 post, I'd like to make a case for how international travel is prejudice against middle America. I'll prove it to you. While I was preparing for my upcoming voyage, I was living in the booming metropolis of Monticello, Iowa. (They pronounce it Montisello not Montichello like that of presidential homestead fame if that gives you any indication of the level of culture we're dealing with here.) In order to submit my visas for China, India, and Ghana, I needed to print PDF copies of the applications to mail to the company submitting the paperwork on our behalf. So I went up to the camp staff office, dusted off one of the old Macs, and went to work. Or tried to. You see, the very first Mac desktops aren't compatible with Adobe. And apparently neither are the computer's security settings. Red lights started flashing and sirens started going off when I attempted to download said Adobe so I quickly aborted the mission. Instead, I had to coerce the lovely nurses into letting me use the computers in their office on two separate occasions in order to print said PDFs. By this time, printing a PDF was something of a miracle. 

The preferred method of submitting these important international PDF documents along with my passport was FedEx. Do you know how many FedEx drop boxes there are within a 25 mile radius of Monticello? None. There are no FedEx drop boxes anywhere near Monticello. According to the map, I would have had to drive over 30 miles to a supposed drop box on a dirt road even more in the middle of nowhere than I already was. And pay $26 to boot to overnight it. I'd have to pay just as much in gas to get it to said drop box. No thank you. The US Post Office (which, thank goodness, every tiny town has) with delivery confirmation will suffice just fine. 

Now onto immunizations...The laundry list for the immunizations required for the countries we are going to is long and involved. And in order to get them I had to drive about an hour away. (Why would there be a doctor in Monticello who knows anything about Japanese Encephalitis? That's just ridiculous.) So I scheduled my appointment with the travel clinic in the closest big city-big being a relative term. The travel nurse went through all of the precautions for all of the vaccinations and, as she was administering one of the immunizations, said something along the lines of, "I don't know much about polio but I sure hope you don't get it." Oh geez. That's comforting. So hopefully I have all of the correct immunizations shot into my blood stream. Fingers crossed. 

So, in summation, I think I have justly proven my point that international travel is prejudice against middle America, against those with computers older than they are, against those with no FedEx boxes in a driveable distance, and against those with travel clinics whose clientele visit exotic destinations such as...North Dakota.