When I saw the photos of the ocean liner with the bright yellow smoke stack sinking, my heart sank as well. For my fortieth birthday, I took the first cruise of my life on Costa with my sister Kelley. We chose Costa mainly for sentimental reasons; my aunts and grandmother, being Italian, used to cruise on Costa back in the sixties and seventies. My aunt Emma, who had a beautiful voice, would sing on the ships and my Aunt Josie would tell us stories about how they made friends with the crew, who were also Italian. The itinerary of the ship that sank was similar to ours, cruising around the Mediterranean, but we went in November. There was one night that it seemed we hit something big, and, of course, we thought about The Titanic. Our cruise was followed by bad weather, rain and we could not dock at one of our scheduled ports. I have taken many cruises since and have sometimes skipped the life vest drill, having become complacent. This incident is a wake-up call to me. I will never skip the life vest drill and I will make sure I know where I need to be in the case of an emergency.
This crash, coincidentally, happened on the same date- January 13th- that an Air Florida plane crashed into the Potomac. As a flight attendant for Air Florida, I was making my final approach into Washington D.C. as it crashed. We could not land, due to the circumstances, but did return to Washington the next morning to pick up our passengers. Most of them, who would have ignored the safety demonstration any other day, had their eyes glued to us as we performed it. Especially the life vest demonstration.
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