5 Thoughts on Vacation Cruises

All right, we did an article honoring my 50th state achievement last week, but while it's been nearly two weeks since I got back from my trip, I wanted to do one more article that stemmed from it.  I went on my first cruise when I was 14, a quick jaunt through the Bahamas that I found incredible.  Growing up in a small farming town, being on the other side of the world was kind of an alien concept to me.  Getting to look up, with a sky full of stars, while I was in the middle of the ocean (or, technically the Gulf of Mexico) was something that I still think back on with a sense of magic.  But in the years that followed, and as I moved into adulthood, I'll be honest-I never really went on a cruise.

The idea of it was very much something I wanted to try, but it was also not really what I was looking for in a vacation.  When it comes to vacationing with me, you'll find that I am always on the go.  I want to see the next thing, do the next event, try the next landmark.  Cruises are not really structured that way.  There are excursions (I went on four of them while I was there, including an impulse purchase that my friends talked me into which was well worth it), but a lot of it is structured around the ship, and a lot of it, quite frankly, is meant for people who are good at relaxing.  So I was nervous, even going with some friends, to find if sea life was for me.  As it turned out, I fared better than I expected...even if I don't know if cruises are my thing.

1. Cruises are Insanely Convenient

When it comes down to it the thing I was most excited about and that I loved the most in retrospect was the convenience.  I love road trips, but I hate driving, and the cruise...I never had to drive.  The cruise line arranged our airfare, as well as our bus to the ship, and once on the ship, you never really have to worry about anything in terms of getting anywhere.  I had all-inclusive food (for the most part) and all-inclusive booze (again, for the most part), and it was bliss to not have to worry about a schedule, or having to get up-and-about.  I tend to like a buffet-style approach to traveling, never staying in one place too long but always getting a bit of a taste of everything, and that's what a cruise can do.  I saw whales, eagles, glaciers, lumberjacks (oh, the lumberjacks), and while none of it was super in-depth (I never stayed in a single spot on the mainland for longer than a few hours), I felt like I had an experience.  If I were to ever do a cruise again, it would be in an area where I don't need a lot of say in what I'm doing, I just want to get to try it a little bit.

2. Excursions are a Joy...Provided They Go Well

On my trip, I had three really great shore excursions-one on a gondola ride up a mountain, a second whale watching, and a third watching the sexiest lumberjacks you can imagine performing various stunts.  It was the fourth one, though, that I had such a terrible time it almost ruined the trip for me.  I was supposed to go on a train ride into the Yukon, which was honestly the primary reason I picked this trip-I wanted to go into the Yukon and see more of Canada.  As part of this tour, you got to go panning for gold, which I had absolutely no interest in because I'm not a ten-year-old.  I immediately realized when they went that there was a problem-it was a five-hour trip, and we would only get back to the shore a half hour before we left.  When the tour guide waited a half hour for everyone to arrive past the departure time, I understood we would basically be flooring it the whole trip...there was no room for errors.

This ended up being a problem when, after the gold-panning (which I'll own I didn't do...I'm an adult, and thought it was a stupid way to pass the time, so I just read a book), they said that there had been a fire on the tracks and while other cruises that had a later departure time could go, we couldn't...and would still be charged since we got the gold panning.  This is where excursions suck, because I knew that the ship had planned this event poorly (any moron could tell you that they were playing with fire, albeit I didn't think literally, with their scheduling).  All of the people who had been on the cruise who'd left for their tour at 9 AM got to do the train ride, but because we have no say in what we're doing, you don't get to react and say things like "let's do the train rather than the gold panning."  Excursions are great because they're organized, but unlike when you're traveling by yourself, you don't get to have a Plan B when it goes awry.

3. The Food is Fine

The biggest difference between my cruise at 14 and my cruise in my 30's was the cuisine.  I remember gorgeous meals when I was on that initial cruise-it was the first time I'd ever seen cherries jubilee, for example.  This cruise isn't intended for that-it's much more about convenience.  The food in the buffet was appropriately unflavored.  This doesn't necessarily mean it was bad (it was fine), but it was also a very repetitive menu.  I could set a watch by what would be served at the buffet, and at most of the restaurants, there wasn't a lot of differentiation when it came to what we were eating.

The one exception was the "fancy" night where you got to have (with your ticket) a gorgeous meal, which we picked as a steakhouse dinner.  This was what I'd remembered when I was a kid-shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, raspberry creme brûlée. It gave me truly heinous heartburn (or something on the ship did), to the point where I stopped drinking the last two days (I also was 100% the guy they made money off of with the booze as I'm not a very big drinker) and had a cold for a week afterward (my heartburn still isn't totally back to normal), but that was the one night the food lived up to the hype.  If I did it again, I'd probably set aside a bit more for cuisine, either buying more fancy meals or (honestly) eating on the shore more often, where I could get "real" food.

4. I'm Not Sold on Cruise Culture

I will also own that I am not someone who exemplifies cruise culture.  I was so glad that I brought friends with me, but even I forced myself to talk to strangers on the cruise.  I'm not someone that enjoys meeting new people.  In real life I am chronically shy when you meet me, especially in situations like this where the fraternization is pretty forced and there's no guarantee of having anything in common, and while I met some people that I liked, I didn't love the idea of constantly getting to know people, and really wasn't into the dozens of little classes and shopping excursions on the ship.  I was much more content to stay in the library (my favorite place on the ship-god bless the people who respected sitting in absolute silence while the rest of the cruise was getting loudly drunk) catching up on my books & magazines.

This is a weird one to say, as well, but I also think that cruises aren't really made for single people, or I was doing it wrong (maybe it just wasn't for single gay men).  This is partially, I suspect, because I was on an Alaskan cruise and not a more tropical one, but I did not meet one single gay man on the cruise, and I went to multiple LGBTQ+ mixers.  It was exclusively couples, and while I didn't go on the apps, this was honestly a huge surprise to me as I expected to see more single guys on this cruise (it wasn't why I went, get your head out of the gutter...but it had crossed my mind).

5. It's Good and Bad for Your Health

The one thing that I hated about the ship was the way it messed up your sleep schedule.  I was already in a different place, three time zones away, so my religious 10 PM-6 AM sleep schedule was at risk.  But in a room without windows, if you spent time in your cabin, you constantly felt like you should sleep.  I didn't do a lot of the night life, so I spent a few nights on the 7-day cruise in my cabin watching movies or reading, and almost always I had to fight the urge to want to sleep.  This honestly may have contributed to the cold I experienced.  Throw in that a cruise is basically like Vegas when you're above deck, and I was in Alaska in May (aka the land of the midnight sun), and my body never had any idea what time it was.

But in another way, that was marvelous for my health.  The thing I never stopped loving was the views.  I dressed inappropriately (in my house, you wear shorts pretty much year-round, and when it's May, it's mandatory, even on a ship...again, the cold was inevitable), and was chilly a lot, but that didn't mean I wasn't sitting on the deck every second I could, taking in a mountain or a vista or just the open ocean.  I saw multiple schools of orcas just at sea...my David Attenborough-loving self was in love.

I also didn't spring for the internet, which was an adjustment.  I have a pretty bad phone addiction, and am constantly in need of my Twitter and the news, and there were days I couldn't even text.  This was also invigorating.  It meant that I needed to adjust (I struggled to know what to do before bed without scrolling for fifteen minutes on TikTok or watching a streaming show on Disney+), but it was also delightful.  I forgot how fun it is to just sit and read a book without any expectation of doing something else.  I felt a perverse little sense of secrecy in not keeping people I was texting updated on my days, seeing a bunch of whales or drinking a pina colada and sharing it with no one.  If there's one thing I want to bring back, it's that sense of focus, that ability to actually stay on-track and not get lost in a wave of multitasking that gets nothing done.