Cruisin'

Through the generosity of my parents, my family had the opportunity to my parents and my brother's family on a cruise to the eastern coast of Canada. The experience was a novel one on a number of levels: first, my wife and I had never gone on a cruise and second, we had never had the pleasure of visiting the eastern Canadian coast. We were going to break new ground and have the rare opportunity to do it with the broader family. Here are some musings and highlights:

• I sought out and received a lot of tips and advice from folks around making a cruise a pleasant as possible. Two tips stood out in particular: First, take advantage of the kids' camp programs on the ship. I recognized that the kids (albeit with some initial hesitation and complaining) actually do pretty well with the children's programs, and God bless 'em, it's led to invaluable adult-only time for me and my wife. Second, an underrated but important tip was to take a power strip. In the cabin, we had a single 110V outlet, and being able to multiply that four-fold made it immensely easier to charge electronic devices.
• The cabins were a heck of a lot nicer than I had anticipated. Early in our marriage, I stupidly convinced my wife to take the Amtrak to Florida on a sleeper car, which ended up being a nightmare in claustrophobia. The size of the cabin was barely 8 by 5 feet, with the toilet being one of the chairs with a flip open seat cushion and a communal shower to be shared with five other cabins. Having my view of in-transit lodging scarred by that experience, I was pleasantly surprised to see that our rooms were reasonably sized with a usable bathroom, all of which was attended to by a staff who housekept the cabin three times a day. Very nice.
• One of the things that I was warned about was the likelihood of gluttony, and there was plenty of opportunity to stuff myself of the boat. It sort of lends itself to that sort of behavior, with food stations which are constantly open serving all-you-can-eat good, but not great quality food for which you've already prepaid. I sort of equate it with high-quality college dining hall food. That's not a backhand compliment, given how many people gain their freshman fifteen points after their first year of college. Deep fried chicken tenders, nachos with melted jalapeno cheese, fried oysters, big meats on cutting boards and dessert buffets which could give insulin shock on sight - it was a ridiculous amount of food. Beyond the gluttony, what was also alarming was how cavalier one gets around wasting food. If you sample something and don't like it? Leave it alone and go get something else. I joked with my sister-in-law that I hoped that they pulverized all of the leftover food into a slurry and pumped it into the ocean as a means of not letting all of it go to waste.
• The land excursions weren't bad, but they were hardly the highlight of the trip. Saint John, New Brunswick is a nice, quaint little town that resembles Trenton, New Jersey... wait, maybe it wasn't all that nice, but it served as a good opportunity to stretch the legs walk on dry land. Halifax, Nova Scotia was a little more interesting, particularly Peggy Cove, a glacier-sculpted rock formation along the sea. It might not sound like much, but climbing on those rocks with the kids as the gentle sea breeze rolled across the landscape under blue skies and sun was a fantastic feeling.
• As I told colleagues and friends about the cruise, I found that most people fell into one of two categories. You had the people who had gone on a cruise and loved it, and you had those who had absolutely no interest in going in one. For the latter group, which included me until recently, there's a negative knee-jerk reaction about "being stuck on a boat" for an extended period of time. That's the thing, it's not a boat as much as a floating resort. There are multiple pools, a giant waterslide, three or four restaurants, a couple of clubs, an auditorium and a casino. And my personal favorite was the giant movie screen on the deck, where I watched movies like Beauty and the Beast with the kids lying on a deck chair underneath a starry sky.
• 254 e-mails. As soon as our ship departed New York Harbor on Monday morning and lost my cell signal, I promptly turned my iPhone on "Airplane Mode". While I had numerous opportunities to turn the phone back on when we made landfall in Canada, I made the decision to not break my mental vacation by getting a sneak preview of e-mails which I knew would eventually need to be addressed. I didn't turn it on until our ship returned to dock five days later and saw the e-mail indicator skyrocket. By the time it was done, the mail indicator stood at 254. Back to reality.

It was worth it. Good times.