One thing I’ll avoid is giving travel tips. Not me. If those you want there are more than a plenty of people eager to provide you with that. Selling to every taste, budget, belief and inclination. In this case, for free, the inclination is horizontal. Description, however can be given free of advice or recommendation. 

A particular area where I’m knowledge-deficient is cruising. Others better prepared than I can give you the basics.

If you’ made the mistake of asking and then listening, I’d have predicted a dim-grim fate for cruising world. 

Both old and foolish, I’d have thought more of travel than boating. Knowledge and experience greater than mine assured me the air liner was destined to replace the ocean liner. And so it came to be while also being what was not going to come crashing down, after all. 

It does seem strange that a practice costly and slow as ocean cruising would not only have survived but thrived as well. 

When pre-teen young I lived near a major airport when planes were primarily propeller driven. An uncle lived a mile distant. Between our homes, several crash sites. Ugly reality starred us facially, but dad, who’d earned his pilot wings, was adamant. 

Air travel would carry the day. It did. But not entirely.

An adult who loved flight and a kid who thought more of worm on hooks could not have guessed cruising had a future. Not for all, however. 

The SS United States broke (still holds) the transatlantic crossing record, doing so when it seemed ocean cruising was doomed to die. The SS US has danced on death’s edge for decades, but now it seems will face final rest as an artificial reef off Florida. If speed was the goal, then the ship was always going to lose. Seems obvious now when prediction is of no use. Contemporary cruising is not about speed but travel.   

Builders of the SS US didn’t foresee what we know now, else they’d have taken (in nautical terms) a different tack. Investors in and creators of the fastest liner didn’t see what seems really obvious now. 

Waterborne travel and entertainment had a future. Some seaborne operations could easily pass as floating retirement homes with elderly feet wagging on deck amid open mouth hulks dozing peaceably in the sun. The metabolic fiber martini is a specialty available 24 hours with room service. Harmonious with an elderly expiry date theme is frequent use of round-the-neck name tags replaced by a toe tag on date due. 

If elderly want speed they fly. When swift arrival isn’t needed a sedate on-deck totter does nicely.

By itself, putting geezers afloat wouldn’t have saved cruising. More was needed and was soon enough available in kid- and family-friendly versions of theme-parks afloat. Sitters, water slides, games and activities keep everyone (in particular the wee ones) so busy that exhausted sleep hits sister and junior soon as their little heads touch pillow. 

Having been a child I can guess I’d have liked such a trip as more inviting than a 14-hour drive north for dad’s hay fever vacation in Minnesota. But, my father would no more have planned a family vacation based on kid wishes than he’d have swapped aviation for submarining. 

No matter how I wheedled to ride the DUKS at the Dells dad would not be swayed. If “Your mother and I went there before came along. You wouldn’t like it” was supposed to mollify me the attempt failed. No kid-friendly trip stood in my future. Instead, we barreled forward, stopping for gas synched with dad’s toilet needs and an evening meal.

You might expect companies who provide cruises speak highly of them. Does that surprise? 

The biggest negative often mentioned by prospective cruisers is seasickness, a malady not unknown among the greatest names in nautical history. Nelson, England’s hero of Trafalgar Bay, was famously afflicted. 

Modern, stabilized ships give a relatively calm ride. The (uncommon but not unseen) sight of waves splashing a dining window is possibly more upsetting than the motion. Some say they like the sensation of being rocked nightly to sleep. Or the motion might cause queasiness, a result unknown until too late.

Aside from thinking about a backward version of family migration from Central Europe I wasn’t cruise oriented. The opposite. 

I think it best to be where I am when I’m there and make the best of it. Why go to balmy world when I can enjoy the frozen north? 

Cruising seemed remote and unreal, like thinking I understood the moon because I’d viewed it safely from the spacious deck of planet Earth. My disinterest was amped when a girl I’d been seeing (yes, such unfortunates existed) when Caribbean cruising and returned with a tale of falling in love with a Latinate crew member with a passion for dance (some good lines there will be cast aside). 

If I was supposed to grow jealous and fight for her, the plan failed. If attracted strongly to things far outside my scope, then freedom should be hers. In any case, she moved on and eventually did better. Was that best for her or me or who?

Not that I (with ancient history of fun aversion based on loudness and cost concerns) was much aware of it at the time, I’d suppose my female associate was attracted by singles or party cruise appeals as lost to me as is Braille. 

Why I’d pick going north toward Hudson’s Bay over a trek to the tropics is anyone’s guess, though some have suggested impractical stubbornness as sufficient cause. 

Whether or not, neither you nor I nor any need apologize for their own sense of sacred being. Whatever makes you or I who-what we are is, I sense, a sacrament between ourselves and a universe too huge to understand while exhibiting compassion requiring no more than our participation. 

In honesty, dear readers, this is not a conversation apt to be encountered on a cruise or much welcome most places our kind rally to for relief from what can’t be escaped.