Cruise People
By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale
Neither of us had ever been on a cruise. My husband, Alex, grew up driving to a family camp in New England every summer. I grew up visiting national parks. For over a decade, we drove our own kids to the beach just a few hours away. We were road trippers, just-over-the-next-hillers, don’t-make-me-pull-this-car-overers.
We swore we were not cruise people. When other people talked about going on cruises, Alex and I would look at each other and know exactly what the other was thinking. Floating diarrhea boat. Trapped asea in a petri dish. Not to mention, sweat, sand, and syrupy umbrella drinks. And the kicker, close proximity to thousands of people as annoying as we are. No thank you.
At least on a road trip, we’ve got our crazy locked in. Sure, we have to spill out at a roadside gas station now and then, but we’re in good company standing in line for the bathroom with other tousled road trippers shoving Crocs on sweaty kids. For hours, we can roll down the interstate without anyone knowing what our kids are doing, saying, or smelling like.
Somewhere along the way, the kids grew up and out and our vacation options changed. Our one kid available for a summer vacation hated the beach. We didn’t really like it either. It was just convenient. We knew we wanted to go somewhere, but where?
We asked Elliott if he could go anywhere, where would he want to go? He said Norway. I’d always wanted to go there, so I was thrilled. He wanted to see fjords, and when I talked to our travel agent, she sent me cruise options.
What. No, not a cruise. I said Norway, not the Bahamas.
I immediately emailed her back. Um, thank you no. Are there any land packages? I was picturing a plane, a train, maybe even an automobile. While I waited for her to respond, I clicked the links she’d sent, ready to hate on these ridiculously big boats.
The hate never came. When I scrolled through the list of fjords we’d be able to see in less than two short weeks, I realized a cruise was the best way to do it. So just this once, we booked the cruise.
Just this once. We were still not cruise people. We spent the next year researching what to expect on our cruise, this lone exception to our no cruising policy.
Alex immediately googled the likelihood of our boat hitting an iceberg. I googled the likelihood of norovirus taking us out and pledged to pack Clorox wipes to attack all surfaces on board. But as we settled into the idea of a cruise, we got excited. Adventure! We’d see Norway just like we wanted to, only our hotel would follow us to all the spots we wanted to see.
I studied the floor plan, scoured the internet for information about our specific boat, and read up on everything from the dining options to the fitness center. I learned new vocabulary like “muster station.” Alex found a video tour of the room we’d be staying in. I grilled our friends who’d cruised before on what to expect. We booked a few excursions at the various ports and planned our own hikes. As I made dinner reservations, I discovered that each night had a different theme and dress code. Reluctantly, we packed an extra suitcase just for the various dinner themes.
After an entire year of build-up, we finally set forth, arriving a day early in Amsterdam, and after shrugging off jet lag, the next day when it was our time to board, we made our way to the ship. Gazing up at this huge behemoth, our son whispered, “Whoa.” We crossed the gangplank and stepped onto the boat. It was happening. We were officially cruising.
I felt like Bob Wiley in What About Bob? when he was tied to the boat yelling, “I’m sailing!” into the wind.
We headed to the dining hall while we waited for our room to be ready, which was apparently what the thousand other people on board had done too. Our son froze in panic. Every person on the boat seemed to be queuing at the salad bar at the same time, and we noticed that most of them had one thing in common.
He murmured, “So much gray hair,” contemplating spending the next two weeks trapped with the cast of Cocoon. “There’s a teen lounge,” I offered, knowing that wouldn’t matter because a) there weren’t enough teens on board for said lounge and b) my teen didn’t lounge.
We squeezed into seats and exchanged nervous glances, each of us confronting our worst fears.
Elliott: old people
Alex: iceberg
Me: diarrhea
After a quick lunch where we felt overwhelmed and rethinking our life choices, we headed to our room to unpack, hide, and regroup. Our room had a drop-down bed for Elliott and a porthole window thingy where we could cuddle up and watch the waves sail by.
“Freeze! Don’t touch anything!” I commanded as we entered the room. Alex and Elliott humored my neuroses.
I wiped down all the surfaces with Clorox wipes, doing my part to slay the norovirus demons. We stashed our stuff, then we played a round of putt-putt golf and I tried the climbing wall. When it was time to pull out of the port-dock-thingy, we headed to the deck to find a good spot to watch the ship glide out to sea.
We waved at strangers as we left and I gripped the railing, feeling dizzy as we started to move. Thankfully, my eyes adjusted quickly and we watched, fascinated, as we sailed into the lock leaving Amsterdam, rising to sea level, before entering the whole ocean.
We were asea. Ahoy.
We walked back to our room. Elliott grabbed his book and curled up in the window ledge with a blanket, watching the waves.
I grinned, my heart full. I know people cruise every day, but this was new for us and we were doing it, having an adventure.
Maybe we were cruise people after all.
It was us and a ton of retirees living their best life, and we were content to be the quiet ones. While they stayed up partying into the wee hours, we discovered that we could get pizza at midnight and bring it back to our room, where the three of us lay in bed and read stacks of books like happy nerds. We ditched our fancy dinner reservations and theme nights in lieu of sweats and T-shirts.
Norway was the trip of a lifetime. We fell in love with its fjords, waterfalls, weather, and people. We threw snowballs and hiked and saw reindeer and sent postcards from the tippy top of the world.
We also fell in love with cruising, our kind of cruising, the kind where they hand out blankets instead of beach towels and we sipped hot tea instead of mai tais, celebrating when we crossed the Arctic circle.
This summer we’re cruising north again, this time to Alaska. We’re cruise people now, cold water cruise people, and we can’t wait to get back on board.
Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and Calm the H*ck Down. She’s a writer for the TV series Creepshow, a monthly contributor for Coffee + Crumbs, and her essays are published in The Magic of Motherhood. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in articles in Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, The Bump, Working Mother, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. To get out of the office, she spent the last few years shambling about as various zombies on The Walking Dead. She and her husband live in the Atlanta area with three kids from three different continents and an anxious Maltipoo named Khaleesi.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.