We met some new people

Rick and I tried unsuccessfully to get some of our family and friends to go on the cruise with us. Because of schedules, cost and other challenges, it just didn't work out for anyone else to join us. We've been on one other cruise by ourselves, and the other three have been with friends or family members. It is really fun to go with other people, but we also knew we would have a fun time by ourselves, and we were right.
The evening meals are served at the same table with the same group of people. We were interested to see who we would be dining with for the week. To our great delight, we ended up being assigned to dine with four single women. Sandra and June were friends from Ft. Lauderdale FL and they were both widows who recently lost their husbands. Sandra was originally from West Virginia and June was born and raised in New York city. They are both deacons in the Presbyterian church and they are delightful women. We also met Edith and Linda, who were friends from Los Angeles. Edith is Argentine and has lived in the states for many years. Linda was from Taiwan but she has lived in LA for many years as well. We were all mothers and grandmothers, so we had that commonality. Since we have visited West Virginia and Argentina, we had that in common with two of the women. We talked for hours about their lives, their families and their religions. We were able to tell about our family, religion and the area where we live. They were very gracious and wonderful to talk to Rick about his work and his interests as well. He felt like a king surrounded by all these accomplished women. All of them have visited Utah and have had some contact with our church. It was delightful to share our evening meals with them and to learn more about life in their sphere of influence. We enjoyed meeting back at the table in the evening and telling each other what activities we had done during the day. We were able to give them each a pass-along-card with our church information and our email address at the conclusion of our time together and to invite them to Utah as our guests sometime in the future. We hope they take us up on the offer.
Coincidentally, we also ran into a couple who live in our own neighborhood. We don't know them very well, but we had a nice time chatting with them over lunch one day. Since Rick wore his BYU stuff almost constantly, several other people on the ship and on shore said hello to us as fellow Utahns. We had some good opportunities to mix and chat with other people while on our shore expeditions, and it was wonderful to met and greet new people from all over the world.