Since moving to Monterey, I have been playing bridge a couple of days a week and the club has some people who love going on cruises and have done so multiple times. Then there are those (like me) who are mystified as to its appeal and would not do so even if the high cost were not a problem.
When I ask the cruisers what the appeal is, they talk of the good food that is constantly available and the variety of entertainment that is offered. But its seems to me that you could eat at good local restaurants and go to good entertainment events where you live at much lower cost and space them out for greater pleasure, rather than cram them all into one week. They also give as an appeal the fact that being on a cruise is like living in a floating hotel that takes you to different locations for sightseeing with you having to unpack only once in your cabin. I can see that constantly packing and unpacking as one goes from hotel to hotel while traveling could become tedious but hardly seems worth being stuck on a boat for a lengthy period where there is the constant risk of seasickness, not to mention epidemics of viruses. Who can forget the horror stories such as the Norovirus and Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships from a few years back?
I have been on long ship voyages (three in fact) but that was back in the days when I was a young boy, prior to jet planes, when this was the main mode of transport for long distances from point A to point. B, not for going on a round trip back to the starting point. My trips between Sri Lanka and England were on big ships but they were not luxury liners though they did have things to entertain people so that they did not go bonkers by being constrained for two weeks in a small space. So maybe any desire that I might have had for a long sea voyage has been satiated. Anyway, to each his own, and I figured that if these cruises satisfied the needs of others, that was fine even if I could not fathom their appeal.
But then I came across this essay by David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises that appeared in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Titled Shipping Out, it had two features. It described in acute detail what life on a luxury cruise is like and it also gave me a clue as to what their real appeal might be.
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