My wife and I have wanted to take an ocean cruise all our lives. So after some prodding from friends and family, we finally took the plunge last week.
Well, not literally. The cruise people generally frown on people jumping off the side of the boat. Besides, I’ve seen too many shark movies to think plunging into the ocean is ever a good idea. I just know there were a whole swarm of them following the ship, just waiting for me to fall over the railing.
Our expectations of cruise life were set — rather unreasonably, as it turns out — by watching years of Love Boat when we were kids. It all looked so magical. Fancy clothes, fancy cocktails, dancing, dinners at the captain’s table, and a shipboard romance or two to spice things up.
Except my wife warned me against shipboard romances, or I’d be swimming home. I told her she’d better hope my childhood crush, Jill Whelan, didn’t show up then, but she just laughed in my face and said if Jill did show up, she was more than welcome to me.
I tried to call her bluff, but unfortunately, Jill was not on the cruise. Plus, she’s married to a former Denver Bronco who’s rich and could probably pummel me. So I’m still happily married and have never once had a shipboard romance, other than trying to kiss my wife on a canoe trip once.
Our four-day cruise left Miami on Monday afternoon, sailed to the Bahamas, spent a day at a private beach, and then sailed home on Thursday morning. You know, like the pirates of old must have done. Sail lazily around the Atlantic Ocean, plunder a couple merchant ships, get conch fritters for lunch, and then head home.
It turns out, there weren’t any fancy dinners at the captain’s table either, although I saved an extra seat for him in case he showed up. He must have been hanging out with Jill Whelan and her husband, because he never showed, either.
We had booked this cruise in the spring, and I had my itinerary all planned: Lounge in the sun by the pool, eat from the buffet, and read book after book.
Except I skipped the pool.
I had a couple issues from when we shoved off, though.
I say "shoved off," because I’m a veteran sea dog now. My four days at sea, sailing in a giant hotel on fairly calm waters, have made me feel more at home on the sea than on land. Now I have salt water running through my veins, which has my doctor rather worried.
My biggest complaint is that we didn’t wave and throw streamers to the people — landlubbers, to us sea dogs — as we cast off from the dock. There were no streamers or confetti, no cheers, no celebration at all, in fact. They didn’t even blast the big horn.
At least I think they didn’t because I fell asleep before the departure; I woke up after we had been out to sea for at least 30 minutes.
We also didn’t drink on the cruise. The average price for a cocktail was around $15 per drink, and I didn’t feel like spending the cost of one bottle of top-shelf liquor on two overpriced drinks made with cheap booze.
Oh, sure, you could buy a drinks package for at least $70. That entitled you to as many as 15 drinks in a 24-hour period. That’s a $225 value for only 70 bucks! Now you can get smashed at sea for a third of the price!
And at those prices, you only need to get five cocktails to break even. Five margaritas, mojitos, daiquiris, and things that were an electric shade of blue, and it cost you $5 less than if you’d bought all of those one at a time.
So think of how much money you’d save if you could drink 15 of those a day!
Except I don’t even know if I could drink five drinks a day anymore, let alone 15, so would it really be worth it? I haven’t done that since college.
"Wow, the seas are pretty choppy, huh? Poseidon must be angry about something."
"We haven’t even left the dock yet."
"No, I’m pretty sensitive to this kind of thing. We sea dogs are pretty in tune with the rhythms of the ocean."
"More like you’re pretty in tune with about five of those little umbrella drinks."
"That’s completely untrue! I also had a bunch of those little pigs in a blanket at the buffet. I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up if the captain wants dinner."
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.