Aboard Ship

[Martin Hash]

MSC Opera.JPG

My wife, Gwynne, and I have been on a dozen or so ocean cruises: mostly the West coast of Mexico and the Caribbean, but also the Baltic Sea & South America. Our trip to the Greek Isles was the first time we’d gotten a cabin without a window because the additional charge seemed like too much money for only a week. There was a big mirror in its place that rattled synchronized with the ship’s engines that I kept looking into disappointingly, even more so because it kept reminding me of my receding hairline. And always before, it's been English-speaking ships even when most of the passengers spoke something else, but we got our first experience of how that felt because the ship's language was Italian. Add to that it being the most crowded ship we’d ever been on, even though it was relatively large at five-thousand passengers. Even worse, the ship was absolutely dominated by kids; both pools were always full even though there were special children pools and a gigantic children’s water park. Plus the kids never went to bed; they were in all the bars and at all the restaurants. Their parents seemed unconcerned about anyone else’s cruise experience but their own; they danced with their kids, sang karaoke with their kids, turned every venue into a playground. I never complained once, and neither did Gwynne, because we knew we were going to be exactly the same way when we start to take our grandkids on cruises; maybe worse?

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Of course, we also bitched about how expensive the drinks were, and that there was no walking deck. We ate dinner with a Dutch couple who didn’t speak much English but what made it truly frustrating was that we wanted to hear about the woman’s brother who was on the famous Malaysian flight 370 that disappeared several years ago. Also, right as we were entering the open sea, while Gwynne was taking out her camera, her ship keycard slipped out and flew off the deck into the ocean. “My card committed suicide before I even got to use it,” she lamented. “It died a virgin,” I replied, consolingly.



p.s. I got a super-expensive ship-satellite text from my son: “Happy fathers dad,” that was totally worth it.