Join Diane Meyer Lowman, an empty-nester from suburban Connecticut, on her daring journey of self-discovery at the age of 57.
In search of fulfillment and purpose, Diane embarks on a life-changing adventure: a senior year abroad studying her literary hero at the prestigious Shakespeare Institute in Stratford Upon Avon. With nothing to hold her back, she sells her belongings and enrolls in the M.A. program, ready to take on the challenge of being a "mature student" and expatriate.
In the summer of 1979, Diane Meyer Lowman, a nineteen-year-old Middlebury College student, embarked on a ten-week working trip aboard a German container ship with a mostly male crew.
The journey would take her from New York to Australia and New Zealand, through the lush Panama Canal, to a Koala sanctuary and a Maori Museum. She swabbed decks and mended linens, navigated not only the Panama Canal, but perhaps more harrowingly the awkward and sometimes threatening male shipboard society and politics. The voyage would forever change her perspective on the world and her place in it. She left the port of New York a subservient, malleable girl and sailed back past the Statue of Liberty a more confident, independent, resilient young woman who’d learned to stay the course, even in the roughest of waters.
““Nothing But Blue is written with shimmering prose and an authentic voice. Never at a loss for a metaphor, Diane writes with precise detail, rendering her adventures at sea so vividly, I felt like I was on the ship with her, seeing nothing but blue.””