4 minute read
Cruise - Experience
DIARY OF A Cruise Convert
On a family voyage through Italy, Greece and Turkey, cruising newbie Leah Rumack learns to get on board.
I’d never thought of myself as a cruiser. I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveler: I backpacked through Europe before the Internet, for goodness’ sake!
But when my 12-year-old son, Ben, developed an interest in European history, my husband, Jason, and I decided to seize the last seconds that Ben thinks hanging out with us is fun to finally take that family trip to Europe.
Driving around Greece is our original idea but planning a multi-stop vacation quickly feels like a full-time job, and the potential pitfalls — visions of Jason and I arguing about which unmarked remote road, exactly, will lead us to our affordable hotel — start to dance like frenzied spanakopita in my head. So, I throw up my hands and reach out to a travel advisor in a panic. While she usually works with clients who have plusher budgets, our advisor also caters to the harried middle class, and she leads me down an unexpected path. “What about,” she suggests, “a cruise?” Hotel prices during high season are more expensive than a room on a ship, and we won’t have to worry about getting ourselves from one city to another.
I’m worried that a cruise will be uncool and that the food will be humdrum (the fastest way to ruin a vacation for me) but our advisor steers us towards the new Edge Series ships from Celebrity Cruises, and we’re pleasantly surprised. Ours is an 11-day Mediterranean cruise through Italy, Greece and Turkey. Our ship, Celebrity Beyond, is airy and modern, the food is good — Daniel Boulud has a restaurant on board — and we end up visiting places we would never have gone to on our own, like Istanbul, which I’m now desperate to go back to.
There’s something freeing about snoozing in a floating hotel and just being plonked in Santorini for the day. While you’ll have to make peace with the fact that you’re probably not going to be dining at the hippest new restaurant in Naples because you’re on deadline to get back to the ship, you do get to dispatch your extremely picky eater to the pizza buffet every night while you and your spouse go alone to the fine dining restaurants. Jason and I went out for dinner more times over those 11 days than we’d done in the previous 11 years. And there truly is something magical about being at sea. People can’t believe the unfiltered pics of the sunsets and the water that I post, and neither can I.
By the end of our trip, Jason is a cruise convert. He hadn’t traveled much in Europe, so the ability to knock several bucket-list spots off in one fell swoop is a win, and we both loved having the aggravations of entrance fees, tours and transportation smoothed away for us with the ship’s shore excursions. Cruising also has the hilarious side effect that it gives us something to talk about with my parents: There’s nothing a boomer mom loves arguing about more than the relative merits of various cruise lines!
I wouldn’t say I’m a capital-C cruise person now — if I’m going to a new city, I’d like to spend a few days there to really get to know it — but I wouldn’t say I’m not a cruise person, either, especially if the alternative is me completely project-managing our trips. Let someone else do the sailing for once because, baby, I’m on vacation.
