If only it were that easy. Cruises have changed a lot since I last went on one -- way back in 1987 or something, with my parents. I remember being forced to eat with strangers on that cruise; specifically a rootin' tootin' country family made more interesting by a wife who was missing several fingers. I was in the 2nd grade, and 2nd graders have a hard time eating with people who are missing fingers without staring at where the missing fingers should be. I also remember giant ice sculptures hovering over the buffet, and I remember being escorted out of the casino because I was roughly a decade away from the legal gambling age.
For me, the main benefits of cruising in 2007 were that I could now gamble without risk, and that I didn't have to share table condiments with two-fingered Betty from Ten Nen Nesse. Along with my special lady and two friends, we trekked out to a New York dock the weekend before last, primed, prepped and ready transform a normal, everyday cruise ship into anything and everything Prince ever sung about. Or at least, whatever he sung about that scored a Joker scene in Batman. Fuck everything else.
We sailed out on the Norwegian Spirit, which isn't the biggest or most extravagant ship out there, but on the other hand, the only difference I noted between our ship and the giant Carnival ship we were docked next to was that they had a rock wall and we did not. Right, like I'm going to wait on a half hour line just to prove to the world that some seven-year-old can climb fake rocks better than me.
This article's going to be a little disjointed, and it's time I admitted that. I'm not sure where I want to go with this, but I have to write it. If I don't, there's no passing the trip off as a business expense. I think we're just going to have to waddle through this aimlessly and see where it goes. Maybe it will stop in Port Canaveral, where alligators play Pinochle with astronauts!
I really like cruise ships. It's just one of those little things that make me eccentric and wholly unique. I don't think there was anything particularly remarkable about the Spirit; in fact, it's one of the least hoity toity floating hotels out there. Still, speaking as someone who jumps at the opportunity to sleep at run down Holiday Inns just on the off chance that they have an interesting vending machine or game room, the idea of living, partying, eating, drinking, gambling and cavorting on a boat was my main attraction to this vacation. I didn't even care about our ports of call -- those seemed more like chores. I just wanted to float, and marvel at how many things I could do while floating. I counted, and the number is too long to type out without breaking the tables. Just imagine.
If you've never been on a cruise, how can I explain it? You...on a boat...with people...also on a boat. Let's go with this: Pick a Las Vegas resort, scale it down by 60-70%, and make it swim instead of stand. "At sea" days are mainly spent rotting away on the sundecks; eating, drinking and developing conspiracy theories about how the casino operators are burglars. It's an escapist weekend -- you're not going to be using your cellphone much, and if you want to check your e-mail, they'll make you sit on ass-breaking hardwood chairs in a pathetic little stupid cafe, where you'll browse the World Wide Web using AOL 2.5 at prices so large, I can't type them out without blah blah blah blahahahhah. If you'd consider wrestling a few pieces of buffet toast away from gnarly giant beasts wearing novelty t-shirts as a fair tradeoff for a week away from it all, a cruise can be a very good thing.
Cruises start stronger than they end, much like 24 season 6. When you're leaving and you've got the whole week ahead of you, it's euphoric. By midweek, when the clock starts to tick more audibly, you start to feel a little down. By the time the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean began reverting back to the toxic brown waters of the tri-state area on our return trip, I kind of wanted to die. And I wanted my death scene to be scored with the music from the "Retarded Batman" YTMND video.
The picture above was from our first day on the ship -- actually, our first hours on the ship. Everyone gathered on the top deck to drink underspiked Bahama Mamas out of big plastic cups in celebration of our collective civilization lost. As low-rent DJs invited everyone up to dance the Macarena, I peered off the side rail, made sure nobody was looking and flicked a smoke into my hometown's dirty waters. I was James Dean, Nautical Edition, motherfuckering yes.
Cabins on any cruise are tiny by hotel standards, but I didn't think ours was too bad. It had a bed, and it came with those logo-branded pens I so love to collect. We had a private balcony, and my friends were in the room next to us with their own private balcony. This led to a fair amount of partying being done in our rooms, because, well, it was the only place we could drink all the booze we smuggled onboard. That plus, our rooms had really psychadelic carpeting. It was fun to explore.
I'd read so many horror stories about bed bugs on cruise ships that I was sure our room was going to be a snake pit...and it wasn't, not at all. It was totally clean, and the room guys, who I assume have more official titles than "room guys," kept it that way all week. This is essential, because cruising tends to be the kind of vacation that necessitates three showers or more a day on average. If I'm out of towels, I'm out of my mind. Dirty towels at home on a rough morning...that's your own dirt, so whatever. Dirty towels fresh from the dirty cruise bathroom floor...you better get Maaco.
The bathroom was particularly interesting, with big blaring warning stickers all over the toilets advising us not to flush down any extracurricular items, lest we ruin the entire system for "up to 50 bathrooms" on the ship. See, thing is...warnings like that read more like challenges than do-not-dos. I'd have to imagine that there's at least one bratty kid on every cruise ship who cannot resist the allure of fucking up the johns for up to 50 total strangers. If you can't gamble, you gotta roll the dice somewhere.
As for the mouthwash, you might be wondering why it's a few shades darker than the norm. Simple: It's not mouthwash. It's cool how you catch things like that. It's not mouthwash, it's absinthe. Sebor Absinthe, to be exact, which is something my friends and I cannot vacation without. Frankly, we wouldn't get along well enough to survive a weekend, let alone a week, without utilizing some kind of mystical novelty liquor to help dull our wits into weeklong running jokes about what a shitty movie 8MM was. Kill 'em, Machine. We've been vacationing with absinthe for several years now, and it never disappoints. Example: I drank it at that horror convention, and ended up rubbing Betsy Palmer's shoulders while the guy who played the Tall Man walked by making "shame shame shame" finger motions. This doesn't answer the question of why it's in a mouthwash bottle. I'll do that now.
Can't speak for every cruise line, but Norwegian doesn't allow any kind of liquor to be brought onboard. You can bring wine, but they charge you fifteen bucks a bottle -- a "corkage fee" -- if they catch you with it. Despite whatever safety reasons they have for these rules, it's pretty obvious that it's got something do with forcing people to spend their alcohol funds at the boat bars. Even if you buy liquor onboard from one of the shops, you can't have it until you're home. This is what happens when you float out of bounds...people stop acting AMERICAN.
The mouthwash plan went off without a hitch. Well, that's not exactly true. My bags got to the room much later than everyone else's, and I was convinced that they were being held in the infamous basement room where violating cruises were sent to apologize and take a few paddle whacks on the ass. Sebor Absinthe ain't cheap. But, they finally came, and we had sugar cubes, and all was well.
It's worth mentioning that all of the mystique and intrigue and European class that comes with drinking absinthe is somehow diminished when you're pouring it out of a god damned bottle of generic brand mouthwash. What am I, 12?
I can't stress enough how important it is to be drunk when you go on a cruise. Let's take the towel animal above, for instance. Towel animals are a staple on most cruise lines. When you get back to your room at night, you'll find that magical little elves have left you gifts in the form of towels folded to look like everything from dogs to turtles. When you're sober, it's cute. When you're plowed, it's just cause to do a barefoot lap around the top deck, screaming "IF THIS ISN'T GOD'S WORK, TELL ME HOW ONE OF YOU IS STRONGER THAN GOD!"
If you're smart, most of your days at sea will be spent at the pool area. It's crowded, but there are enough corners and crevices to hide the criminally antisocial, thank God. We usually sat near the bar, which isn't pictured above, but provided adequate shade from the evils of the sun and gave us first dibs whenever they decided to wheel out another trough full of free hamburgers. People on this boat...they were crazy about those hamburgers.
While crowded and busy and kind of like a big insect hive by day, the pool area is really fun at night. They close down the pool pretty early, but the hot tubs are going in full effect until, I dunno, let's say midnight. They're almost always in use by couples who prefer to have sex in water, but that's pretty fun to watch anyway. Most cruisers tend to do normal cruise things at night, like see shitty stand-up comedians make jokes about cruise food. With that, the awesome pool area is perfectly empty and a great place to kick back, chill out, and contemplate how much damage a rogue wave would do should one decide to hit the ship at that very moment.
We couldn't drink absinthe the whole week, for a few reasons. Number one, there wasn't enough to spread around four gullets. Number two, absinthe tastes like fucking shit. Whether we liked it or not, we were going to have to pay the inflated boat rates to get our loads on. After spending a week doing not much outside of drinking, I can give you a few tips.
Stay the hell away from the fruity mixed drinks. There were times that I'd order something like a Mai Tai and be 100% absolutely positive that there wasn't a drop of alcohol in it. And you know what I did about it? NOTHING, I'M TIMID! Plus, there's this whole shady scheme where they always give you the drinks in these big plastic "collector's cups" unless you explicitly tell them not to. Unfortunately, it's easier to just pay the extra two bucks than to tag "...AND PUT THAT TOOTIE WOOTY COCONUT CHILLER IN A REGULAR GLASS" onto every drink order.
Stick with beer. They can't fuck up beer, and you can buy it buy the bucket! That in of itself has entertainment value, as you never know what kind of bucket you're going to get. What, you thought they had a collection of cruise-branded silver pails, just waiting to be lugged? Not the case my friends. We had everything from repurposed giant sour cream buckets, to eerie pink ones with pictures of pigs with "Friendship" written underneath in cursive text. I even saw one poor family get a really used and crusty bucket with "STUFF" written on it in permanent marker. When left to the imagination, "STUFF" means trouble.
As I wrote earlier, the technologies involved with our everyday lives have little to no place on a cruise ship. I'm not saying that the cruise staff pulls a Wuher on you and makes the Droids wait outside...it's just that phone calls are something like $75000 a minute. Even the cabin televisions adhered to these rules, only broadcasting a couple of channels -- and most of them were just infomercials for various for-pay shit across the ship. One of the channels had nothing but Seinfeld on, and I don't mean a marathon. It was the same episode, all week along, over and over again. "The Cafe" was the name of the episode. When I'm 85 and riddled with Alzheimer's, I'll still be able to recite every line from that episode. Backwards, forwards...however you want it.
You're probably wondering why someone would spend all that money to drink normal beer and watch normal Seinfeld episodes. Good point. While I'm perfectly satisfied doing just that, most people cruise for the "ports of call," which is just a fancy way of saying, "places that the cruise docks at so its passengers wander around for too short a time to actually do anything fun." You really don't get a long enough stay at any of the ports to do as much as you'd like, but it wouldn't make sense for the cruise lines to drop one port and extend your stay at the others -- after all, they're just giving you the destinations in the brochures...not the time limit. I think I have a good point.
It's not that big of a deal, but it's important to note that "ports of call" do NOT equal "mini-vacations" within the cruise. Don't be fooled. Just grab whatever you can out of the ports and be satisfied with that, and you'll be much happier than trying to, for example, explore all four parks in Disney World in a six hour span.
The picture below is from our most leisurely port, a private island owned by the cruise line. At least, I'm pretty sure they own it. Maybe they just rent it from Captain Ron. Remember Captain Ron? He was a wackadoo.
The picture was taken during the day, but we actually got to go the island the night before, for a five hour luau. That was fun. Laying on beach chairs, sucking face with the cool night breeze, smoking illegal cigars and still talking shit about 8MM. By day, it's a haven for all sorts of fun things that I do not personally indulge in, like, for example, stepping foot in the ocean. I have a phobia and it's crippling. You can snorkel, kayak or whatever else, or you can do what I did: Sit on the beach and play God to the thousand baby hermit crabs. I popped a piece of cinnamon Trident in my mouth and called myself the terrestrial version of Neptune. And, swear to God on a stack of bibles...everyone cheered.
During the nighttime party, I couldn't help noticing that clumps of sand were moving under their own power. Then I said, "Get a hold on yourself, Matt. Tremors was just a movie. Tremors was just a movie. If it wasn't, then Michael Keaton is a deadbeat dad living under an assumed name to skip child support."
No, the sand wasn't moving under its own power. We'd hit GHOST CRABS! Yes, GHOST CRABS! Ghost crabs are neat little critters that spend most of the day under several feet of sand. Come nightfall, they dart all over the place in their eternal quest to eat bugs and splash their gills with refreshing, oxygen-filled ocean water. These guys were everywhere. I should've taken one home and fucked with its head by preparing a hot pot and an Old Bay marinade before doing a 180 and revealing its new customized-to-crab-size bedroom, complete with crab-sized television. I'm not going to eat you, crab. I'm going to be your father.
When you go on vacation, you think you're going to remember the big stuff -- the shows, the sights, the parties, yadda. It never quite works out that way. I went to Niagara Falls as a kid, and while I can't remember seeing a single waterfall, I distinctly recall eating two full boxes of Pine Brothers cough drops on a cab ride from Point A to Point B. I probably won't remember much about our cruise in ten years, but I'll never forget Mr. Ghost Crab and his cute little black stalk eyes.
The private island was a hit, but I can't say that same for our Florida excursion. We chose to go to Disney World, which I won't be writing about, because I already did too much of that last year. Instead, I'll just tell you that you can't possibly do Disney World in six hours. Not unless you're Superman or the shithead from Clockstoppers.
See, we didn't realize when we bought bus and park tickets that Disney World was in fact an hour an a half away from where the boat docked. Factor in the ungodly amount of time that it took to get into the park, and we weren't left with enough time for more than a few rides. Making matters worse was the fact that we went during Memorial Day week, when the park was so jampacked that you couldn't breathe without some derelict yelling at you to stop breathing on him. Yes, they let derelicts into the park. Not cool ones either. Think Steve The Tramp from Dick Tracy. It wasn't the worst experience of my life, but it certainly wasn't worth 150 bucks. The only things that are worth 150 bucks are Franklin Mint commemoratories and good DVD players.
Curious why I'm talking about Disney World under a picture of ten trillion bugs smashed against a bus window? I was just getting to that.
They're called "love bugs." This was my first introduction to "love bugs." Love bugs are essentially retarded flies who do nothing but clumsily mate and land on you while clumsily mating, even when one of the copulators is dead. They're all over Florida. I've never seen anything like it. Disney must have some kind of miracle plan in effect to keep the bugs out of the parks, because you don't really notice 'em when you're in there. Everywhere else, it's a love bug orgy, and you are the vibrating bed.
On the drive down, love bugs crashed against and exploded upon the bus windshield by the hundreds -- maybe even thousands. The picture above was taken when it just started. By the time we actually got to Disney, the front of the bus was at least 80% black. And God...these are juicy bugs. It's not just a "ding" when one hits. It's a "ding" followed by a "splurf." Say it. "Ding. Splurf." Now say it fourteen hundred times. That was our bus trip to Disney.
We were all pretty disgusted at the time, but I guess that was the highlight of our Florida excursion. Sure beat waiting on an hour-long line to see an animatronic Jack Sparrow lift out of a barrel. I can see that at home.
Our final port was Nassau in the Bahamas. Again, not enough time to really explore the place or even get stoned with the locals, but we did had enough time to get accosted by no less than 65,000 low-level entrepreneurs who smelled the tourist on us and wanted to provide everything from cab rides to handjobs. A lot of people complain about the unwanted soliciting, but I didn't mind it much. After all, walking through Nassau is interesting, but walking through Nassau while people shout "ay mon, got whatcha need anytingcha neeeeeed anytingcha neeeeeed" at you every three seconds is worth telling the Internet about.
I couldn't wait to hit the straw market -- it's one of the things I remember from cruising as a kid. The straw market is a big flea market where locals hawk everything from awesome handcrafted wooden piranhas to giant, shellacked sea turtle heads. Picture Satan penning a Sears Wishbook; the straw market was like browsing the catalog. If you're lucky, you might even find misspelled copyright infringements of Nickelodeon characters. Or maybe they spelled them that way on purpose, to skirt copyright? That'd be so brilliant. Flatfoots can't do shit about that.
The market is really cramped, and there's no way to conquer it without being willing to rub skin against both the sellers and customers alike, whose reactions will range from understanding your plight to punching you in the head for the space invasion. Should you ever decide to hit the Nassau straw market, note that the sellers there are vicious. Don't make eye contact. Don't be the only person browsing at any one particular table. And don't EVER ask how much something costs unless you are 99.9% sure that you actually might want it. Do any of these things, and you're in for a ten minute frenetic conversation where prices are haggled, people are begged and cops are called. And the joke will be on you, because the only cops in Nassau are these two guys who run a cockfight ring at the Island Sun motor inn.
I didn't buy much there -- just some non-working wooden flute. I only bought it because the guy selling them called me Nicolas Cage. That was amusing enough to be worth two bucks. Especially because it added an extra thread to all of our 8MM references. Now it was like...we were meant to make 8MM references.
I'm a man of many disgusting vices, and in Nassau, I picked up a new one: Cigars. My friends were on the hunt for Cuban cigars, and they were everywhere. In the shops, on the streets...everywhere. While most visitors likely buy full boxes so they can smuggle 'em back home and spread the wealth like true heroes, I wasn't confident enough in my own cigar aficionosity to grab more than a handful. If I took a drag and coughed like a middle schooler, that'd probably be it for me.
Turns out, I should've bought a box. I love the things. I'm no authority on how much better a Cuban cigar is compared to what you can get in the States, but an obvious part of the attraction is that they're all illegal and elusive. It's like pushing the red button. You're not supposed to bring any home, but as I found out at the end of the cruise, we could've smuggled out four boxes of Cubans, three live conches and a mariachi band without a second glance.
I've been making due with legal cigars since returning home, and though I still don't know if I'm cutting, lighting or smoking them correctly, I feel like such a superstar. All I need is a smoking jacket, an expert level card shuffling skillset, and maybe a cognac glass with which to properly swirl around my Ice Blue Raspberry Kool-Aid.
With the stupid ports and excursions out of the way, we were once again free to enjoy our floating surroundings. There are all sorts of events that go down each day you're at sea, whether it be expensive bingo games, seminars on how to choose the correct timepiece (I'm serious), or as was the case in the above photo, random taco lunch buffets out by the pool. Stumbling upon a taco buffet when you had absolutely no reason to suspect that there would be one is as great a feeling as I can imagine. One unexpected taco is worth far more than one expected taco, and those are the words I've been living by.
The cruise wasn't terribly expensive, all things considered. If you don't opt to eat especially fancy, all of your meals are included. If you can deal with unsweetened ice tea instead of soda, all of your beverages besides alcohol are also included. Despite this, the cruise was one of my most expensive vacations ever, and it's all thanks to the fact that I was locked next to a casino for six nights straight.
Ah, Maharajah's. I can't pronounce you, but I can hate you. From what I've read, the Spirit's casino is actually one of the better gambling environments to be found on a cruise, but it's still tiny compared to anything you'd see in Vegas or Atlantic City. Like, if you're on a bad machine that sucks your money, and you go to another machine all the way at the other end of the casino...you'd still be able to see the cursed first machine out of the corner of your eye. And that...is bad luck.
So our first lesson is...don't play the slots. I'm not saying that you'd have a better chance of hitting it big at a "real" casino, but just from personal experience, these were the coldest, most evil slot machines I've ever encountered. Twenty dollar bills were eaten like Jujubes, and no matter what kind of machine I tried, from traditional slots to video poker to this weird machine that vibrated and sung a verse from "Wild Thing" whenever I got a cherry on the third reel, my money was disappearing quicker than those banned VHS copies of The Little Mermaid with the big penis on the cover.
If slots are out, that just leaves the tables. I've never been much of a table player simply because I lack the etiquette, but my friends turned me onto this game called "Let It Ride," which will probably be the only thing I play in the casinos from now on. So much fun. Giving the briefest, loosest definition, Let It Ride is a poker game that lets you pull back some of your bets to keep your losses down. It doesn't sound like fun when I explain it that way, but between the flashing lights and the odd hand gestures and whatnot, it's vaudeville with a smoking section.
I had some major beginner's luck when I first started playing, ultimately leaving the table with over $500 worth of chips. Don't get excited: I put it all back and then some. I blame this mostly on my own stupidity and greed, but at least some of it has to do with the worst dealer in history...
I won't tell you his name; that would be cruel. Let's call him "Piper." In Let In Ride, the dealers are shifted often, and while they technically should have absolutely no bearing on how well the players do, we couldn't help noticing that our chips dissipated in record time whenever Piper took the helm. It's was as if the casino bosses were watching the action from a hidden camera feed, and when players started beating the house too much...they brought out Piper.
Piper was the worst. He couldn't get through a single hand without some casino higher-up yelling at him for doing something wrong. And then he'd just continue doing it wrong. He'd attempt these really inane and intricate methods of shuffling the deck, only to misfire and shoot a few cards to the floor. I don't know how many of you have been in a casino, but whenever something like that happens, fifty-five people need to sign a contract before the game gets back underway. Piper sucked. My biggest regret in life is that I never told him that.
One of the advantages of cruising is the ship's "Duty Free" shop, where you can buy luxury items that are normally taxed up the ass at special discount rates. Liquors and cigarettes, mostly. As a filthy smoker, I was quick to stock up, but I gots to tell ya...even if I didn't smoke, I'm not sure I would've been able to resist buying cigarettes in such awesome packaging. Love it. If Rick Moranis was a Marlboro sponsor, those would've been props in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. Since he isn't, all we got was a fucking giant Oreo.
They say that all you do on a cruise is eat. Not really true, but you do eat. We preferred dining at the more upscale restaurants -- you have pay a $15 cover, but then you get awesome steaks and sushi, and drinks that come in glasses that weren't recycled from used Pepsi bottles. For everyone else, there's places like "Raffles" -- the Spirit's free-for-all buffet.
Despite it being everywhere on the boat, food seems to be a commodity. Whether it's because restaurants close early or because there aren't any vending machines to let you get a quick Snickers fix, people don't just eat food on a cruise...they hoard it. If you ever go on one, head to the buffet and hang out by the exit. Note how many people leave attempting to carry six plates full of bread, chicken and imitation lobster. And then consider the fact that most cabins don't have refrigerators.
The buffet kind of sucked, and the two other "free" restaurants were barebones affairs with long wait times, but we really liked the for-pay eateries. You're on vacation, so you don't want to spend every meal in a pair of sandals, slopping microwaved pizza down your throat while shooing flies.
Another advantage was the free room service, which consisted of a limited menu, but a menu that could be ordered from by the truckload. Want a sandwich? Order five of them! It got to the point where were ordering shit just to see what it looked like. Couldn't pronounce "crudite," but I think I ordered it at least ten times. Turned out to be two baby carrots with a piece of broccoli on a plate smeared with ranch dressing. Something tells me that's not crudite.
In the end, you're looking at the best part of the cruise. Staring out at the sea, doing nothing. Looking over the ledge and seeing flying fish soar away. Hoping you'll see a shark, never seeing a shark, but continuing to look for sharks because you so desperately want to be able to tell people you saw a shark when you get home. Watching the sunset. Watching clouds cover the moon and adding your own werewolf noises as a supplement. Blowing Cuban cigar smoke into the open wind and pondering why Machine from 8MM isn't considered on the level of a Jason or a Freddy. Listening to the waves hit the ship and realizing how silent it would all be if you weren't there.
I don't think I'll be going on another cruise for a very long time, if ever. Been there, done that, and can't see the experience being much different next time. Still, if you've never been on one, it's so worth it. You'll get drunk, you'll smoke, you'll gamble -- you'll do everything Pinocchio did, and you won't grow asshole ears from it. And you'll float while you're doing it!
