Oh the ultimate of guilty pleasures, cruising- made even more guilty by being of an inappropriate age to love such a thing. Cruising is for old people. No one is shocked when their grandmother goes on a cruise, but when their hip, glamorous, child-free, and well-travelled friend admits to loving it, jaws drop.
I didn’t always love cruising, in fact, the first several cruises I went on, in my early twenties, were complete disasters. Two of them resulted in break-ups. (Two seperate boyfriends for the record) The kind of fights which resulted in us not speaking by the time we docked that last day. Oh how I looked forward to getting off those ships! Good way to see if you really love someone: go on a cruise with them. (A road trip will also do 🙂 ) Another quite miserable cruise was taken with a best friend. It was a seven day cruise. We felt like we were stuck in the food court of of a bad mall mostly. Our last port was New Orleans, which is actually a great port. We seriously considered taking our belongings off of the ship then and there. We even looked into renting a car, but found out that it was quite a hike, so we suffered though the last day of the cruise. Even the pizza was bad. We joked about the girl in the news that had jumped off of a ship and tried to swim. We really understood how someone could be driven to this.
How could a person who had three bad first experiences ever fall in love with cruising? It’s called Island hopping in Hawaii. A friend got a job on a cruise line and my boyfriend and I decided to keep him company for a week. We didn’t have high hopes but just thought we would have as much fun as possible. We had a blast! Looking out from our balcony and seeing different islands each day was incredible. We rented jeeps and explored. We had amazing tuna. We were hooked.
The next cruise we took was as good or even better than the Hawaiian Islands, it was the cruise that everyone should do at least once in their life, or in my opinion, once a year if possible 🙂 the Mediterranean cruise. Oh bliss! How did we decide on a Mediterranean cruise? You won’t believe that it was the bargain hunter in me who decided to research Italian cruise lines right after the Costa Concordia had it’s terrible accident. I thought, surely safety procedures will be greatly improved, and statistically we should be good for a while. I also thought there would be incredible deals, and there were. We flew into Barcelona, which is one of our favorite cities, and boarded the MSC Fantasia there. Off to France, Italy, and Tunisia we went. Talk about a thrill, nothing really tops being somewhere for the first time, looking off your balcony and seeing a foreign land. It’s a person with ADHD’s dream vacation. Constant stimulus. Something wildly different every day. Being on an Italian ship also meant that the feeling of being in Europe was constant. We liked this feeling, though it definitely isn’t for everyone. We fell in love with Italy on this trip and of course made it a point to return there a year later.
Cruises give you the ability to sample many flavors and see which are right for you. They also enable you to try the places which might not be as high on your list, the places that you wouldn’t really want to visit for a week, but you’d like to get a feel of, nonetheless. Sometimes, one of these places shocks you, and you find out you love it.