Today the ship cruised through the deep blue of the Aegean Sea, the sea between Turkey and Greece. The Aegean Sea is named for a king from ancient Greek times named King Aegis, who was the king of Athens. The mythic origins behind the name of the Aegean Sea is that King Aegis’s illegitimate son, Theseus, traveled to the island of Crete to slay the Minotaur: a half-man, half-bull.

As Theseus sat off with black sails to symbolize his certain death, King Aegis told him to sail back with white sails if he was successful. Though Theseus did successfully slay the Minotaur, he forgot to change the sails on the return trip, so when King Aegis saw the black sails approaching in the distance, he was stricken with grief and threw himself into the sea that would later bear his name.

From the beginning of this trip, there have been people sniffling and coughing, which has increased as the cruise has gone along. I guess it is inevitable when you pack that many people together on a ship for that amount of time, and have them running around strange countries with different things in the air than they are used to. As the sniffles and coughs continued to spread, today was my turn.

I woke this morning feeling horrible. My nose was running so fast I couldn’t catch it, and my body felt like Hercules had kicked my ass the day before. The good thing about this was of all days I could have picked to inevitably get sick, this was the best possible day because we weren’t docking anywhere.

I mixed several different kinds of cold medicine and just chilled out reading some Greek mythology. I was hoping to fight the sickness off as much as possible because the next day was a huuuuuuge day, a day I had waited for since I was a kid: Athens, Greece.