Fall, 2003

From hospital and cruise ship traveling nurse to hot air balloonist, Jeanne Gartner ’83 has gone around the world. But she always finds a way to come back to the Pittsburgh area where it all started. Gartner sent IUP Magazine this exclusive article...

While in nursing school at IUP, I was encouraged to read professional journals. I started to see advertisements about the travel nurse program. I was interested but had no experience, and held that idea on the back burner for several years. 

It was after gaining a few years of nursing experience at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh that I hit the road as a travel nurse. My first assignment was in Hartford, Connecticut. I wanted to be within a day’s drive of home in case I hated it, and I’d always wanted to see a New England fall, so it seemed perfect. I loved it! I met new people and was able to travel out from that area and see so much more of New England, plus get to New York City. I was hooked on the area. But soon it was getting to be cold and, since I’ve always pretty much hated the winter, it was off to Honolulu for my next assignment (after a Christmas at home with family of course).

The beauty of the travel program was that you got to pick your start dates and could work them around whatever else was going on in your life. I met a lot of really neat people during those five months in Hawaii, but two particularly influenced me. One of them had a good friend named Gary who worked on cruise ships as a doctor (I tucked that idea away for future reference). The other friend was from Anchorage. She invited me to come home with her for the summer, and so I did—we were both off at the time. We had a ball! Her dad took us flying in his little four-seater plane—I thought I had died and gone to heaven: straight from Hawaii to a gorgeous Alaskan summer. 

When it was time to work again in the fall, I had read about a big hot air balloon rally held each October in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I looked for and found a travel nurse assignment right in Albuquerque. The fall of 1988 was my first real balloon rally, and I was hooked. I looked into that sky full of several hundred balloons and told myself, “Someday I am going to do that!” It took me ten and a half years to finally realize that dream, but I did it. 

During that time I was still a traveling nurse, crewing and chasing balloons when I had the opportunity. For a few years, I tried to schedule my assignments and time off so I could continue to go to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta in October as a crew member, still holding onto my dream of flying one myself. In the meantime, my travel assignments landed me in El Paso, Phoenix, Winston-Salem, Charleston, S.C., a summer camp in North Carolina for a few summers, and finally to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

It was there—working the night shift on the third floor nursery, sitting in the chair rocking my babies at 6:30 a.m. while facing the harbor where all the ships were pulling in for the day—that the old idea of working cruise ships came back to me in a big way. I loved St. Thomas and I loved the islands, but if I was on one of those ships I could visit even more islands and more places. So after I tried settling in Pittsburgh for a year and just couldn’t do it, I started applying to cruise lines. 

The first to hire me was the Big Red Boat, based out of Port Canaveral in Florida, doing three- and four-day runs to the Bahamas (at the time they were associated with Disney World). It was an introduction to the world of cruising, but still not quite what I was looking for. It was essentially a shuttle boat between two places—not a lot of travel involved—but I met wonderful people and enjoyed it for six months. That was when the phone call came from the company I had dreamed about working for—Holland America Line, the cruise line that Gary had pumped me so full of. 

I immediately started sailing with them as a nurse, and enjoyed the job for nearly seven years. To say that they showed me the world would be an understatement. It really was a dream job. To quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...” Fortunately, the best of times outnumbered the bad times. I used to write a long-winded e-mail at the end of each cruise during my last few years, after I got a laptop, and sent it out to about a hundred people. It was actually my notes to myself, but I’d saved most of them—stories about the people on the ship, the passengers and crew, the places I visited, and all the things that happened in between… there were so many memories. 

People always ask me about the highlights of that time. One of them certainly has to be the world cruise of ’96, literally sailing around the world in ninety-nine days and visiting all the places along the way. People also ask me what’s my favorite place. There are so many and I loved them all, but the U.S. Virgin Islands will always be high on my list, especially St. John—such a peaceful, beautiful place. Who could ask for more: Caribbean in the winter and Alaska in the summer, several summers spent in Europe, cruising the Baltic Sea in early summer and the Mediterranean from summer into fall. Late summers and early falls in New England and Eastern Canada were also highlights.