Background

Sometime back in the heyday of alternative lifestyle catalogs -- the late-60s and early-70s -- I came across a catalog called "The Great Escape Book," or something like that. It was loosely modeled on The Whole Earth Catalog, except it focused on providing information about adventures: land adventures, sea adventures, air adventures, nomadic adventures, and a few more categories that I forget.  There was an interesting article in it about traveling by freighter.  I liked it at the time, and although I rarely thought about it over the years, the idea never quite left me.

Then last year I had to occasion to recall it.

Ellen and I had been living in Paris since the summer of 2018, and we needed to return to the U.S. in late-May 2019 to get new visas.  We had come over on round trip tickets, and had our return tickets to the U.S. on hand.  But once we got our new visas, we would only need one-way tickets back to France.

When we looked, the price of a one-way ticket was nuts; it was something like $1,300 each.  So we felt compelled to look for alternatives.  Somewhere in the thought process the idea of traveling by freighter (or cargo ship) popped up, and I started Googling...