Which cruise lines are trashiest?

[CycleTex87 2944]

Hope you got out of Tel Aviv before the shit hit the fan. 

[Mo Horn 8696]

2 hours ago, CycleTex87 said:

Hope you got out of Tel Aviv before the shit hit the fan. 

Flew out at 7:00 Friday morning. Really surreal thinking about it. 

[Don Johnson 4724]

 

[HouTex 1838]

Another recommendation here for Viking, but only the European river cruises.  I've never done a large ocean-going cruise and probably never will so I don't know what they are like.  The Viking river cruises are fabulous, but it is an older crowd.  You probably want to be 40+ years old.  It's great if you can get several couples to plan a trip together.  Two years ago we did a trip with four other couples and a widow (all UT friends from the early 80's) and it was fantastic.  Great wine, food and booze and it's a great way to see several old European cities in one trip.  

[VABuckeye 2472]

Holland America was a great way to see Norway.

[gofuckyourself 8057]

On 8/29/2023 at 2:43 PM, SydneyCarton said:

A cruise is like a C- version of things you'd want to do, crammed into one location. Third rate pools and slides, third rate zip lines (30 yards), third rate wall climbing, 9th rate casino, mediocre food, and booze aplenty if you pay for the daily pass, which I did, although they do try to throttle your consumption. Shitty Snorkeling for an hour, shitty dolphin excursrion for an hour, shitty shopping at the ports where every single one has a fucking diamonds unliminted duty free store. Personally, I'd rather go to a badass island beach, id rather go to las vegas, Id rather not eat at a luby's. But again, I have a kid and that's my thoughts, others might be at different points in their lives.

This nails it.

We returned from my first cruise, which I agreed to participate in 90% to keep the wife happy, and 10% out of morbid curiosity. She won this trip from her first cruise this past winter with her family ... AKA if you gamble enough they want you to come back.

"Highlights" and lowlights:

- good meal in the steak restaurant. Not free. It was $49 a person and a bargain at that, with each course selection being pretty damn good. Oysters, lobster bisque soup, NY strip that was aged, well cooked and seasoned and a chocolate lava dessert with a couple of stiff drinks.

- the drinks for the entirety were all included, again part of the "you're a degenerate gambler? Please come back" treatment. Bad drinks for the most part.

- spa treatments were also very good. Discounted offer we got for showing up to a raffle thing. 75 minutes for around $130.

- entertainment was not great. The cruise director was probably the funniest person on board, see related note below. His introductions and spiels were as entertaining as anything.

- comedy was even worse than expected, and I expected putrid. The "late night adults show" consisted of an older guy laughing through his own jokes and ending with 1960s style one liners that he read from his notebook, which was the funniest bit of the night. The second guy opened with "girl you there in the front row - damn your titties are huge! I wanna put my dick between 'em and fuck 'em!" After that some more highly nuanced comedy requiring a quick wit, which we excused ourselves from to get some more culture elsewhere.

- Excursions were okay and generally very well planned and orchestrated. We went with some snorkeling around a reef and a hotel area beach spot with food/drinks included.

- Onboard water installations are bad. Three small pools crammed with kids and every hot tub somehow crammed even more with kids and teens. Some water slides. A nearby basketball court with 80 people using it. Some mini-golf and ping-pong with 30 knot winds whipping around.

- Attended an onboard art auction because we won a "guess the sculpture" prize. We chose not to purchase their $19,000 art offerings. Highlight was the pretentious art auctioneer deriding the crowd for not knowing an artist's Dali influence, and suggesting they go to Walmart to shop. So he weirdly knew, but expected otherwise, from the attendees.

Overall it was more or less exactly what I expected. I guess I can say I have personally experienced it and with ironclad certainty would 100 times out of 10 choose pay to go to any Mexican, Caribbean, South American, or probably South Dakotan resort -- rather than go on a free Wall-E "Axiom" style cruise. 

Which I will have the opportunity to choose just that, because she again "won" another "free" cruise.

[Wally Fairway 5490]

Following with interest - after going on our first cruise last year; a 3 day test cruise to the Bahamas out of Canaveral - it was okay), we joined in with my wife's family to to a 10 day Alaska cruise this summer. Holland America - rooms look okay, but they will be small; we upgraded to a aft veranda at the suggestion of the SIL who is putting it all together. The excursions seem pretty blah (we've been whale watching before, it's all just touristy crap), dining reviews seem to be decent and we aren't expecting 5 star meals (really not even 4 star), not sure what we will do all day on the sailing days, but I here you get a decent view of the coastline, sea and winged creatures and some blocks of ice. I am not a big drinker, but I am willing to try it out if it helps pass the time.
I am afraid if this goes well it could become a regular thing, as both of our parents have passed and it is only things like this that we get together for bigger family gatherings. I think there are about 20 of on this boat, including some from our kids generation. Personally, I think I'd rather see more of the PNW and drive around, but I don't think you can really do that as easy with Alaska.
Tips for an Alaska cruise are appreaciated - our group age range is 28-74, with most in their 50's-60's. Should I just spice it up by putting the upside down pineapple magnets on each of the groups door?

[Ghost of LL 15244]

16 minutes ago, Wally Fairway said:

Tips for an Alaska cruise are appreaciated - our group age range is 28-74, with most in their 50's-60's. Should I just spice it up by putting the upside down pineapple magnets on each of the groups door?

For a group that size, you are probably best served taking the cruises shore excursion list, seeing what everyone can agree on, and then running a Google search to set up your own private tours.

The salmon aren't running right now, so that removes salmon fishing from the itinerary.  So in Juneau, I might just rent a couple large vans and go out to the Mindenhall Glacier, where there are a few manageable hikes.  There are also a few outfits that will take you out on kayaks on the glacier-fed lake, which should have plenty of icebergs this time of year.

In Sitka, I think you can just take a walking tour of the town on your own with a little bit of Google research on what to see.

In Skagway, that's where you can schedule yourself your helicopter rides over Glacier National Park.

[lemonlime 5485]

2 hours ago, Wally Fairway said:

Following with interest - after going on our first cruise last year; a 3 day test cruise to the Bahamas out of Canaveral - it was okay), we joined in with my wife's family to to a 10 day Alaska cruise this summer. Holland America - rooms look okay, but they will be small; we upgraded to a aft veranda at the suggestion of the SIL who is putting it all together. The excursions seem pretty blah (we've been whale watching before, it's all just touristy crap), dining reviews seem to be decent and we aren't expecting 5 star meals (really not even 4 star), not sure what we will do all day on the sailing days, but I here you get a decent view of the coastline, sea and winged creatures and some blocks of ice. I am not a big drinker, but I am willing to try it out if it helps pass the time.
I am afraid if this goes well it could become a regular thing, as both of our parents have passed and it is only things like this that we get together for bigger family gatherings. I think there are about 20 of on this boat, including some from our kids generation. Personally, I think I'd rather see more of the PNW and drive around, but I don't think you can really do that as easy with Alaska.
Tips for an Alaska cruise are appreaciated - our group age range is 28-74, with most in their 50's-60's. Should I just spice it up by putting the upside down pineapple magnets on each of the groups door?

Whale watching in Juneau was phenomenal. I'd been on other whale watching trips in Maine and New Zealand, and they didn't hold a candle to Juneau.  We saw dozens of whales, really close up.

I don't have any real recommendations for other excursions.  I did a canoe trip in Ketchikan (or Skagway? it's all run together in my mind), and a hike in the other of the two, and scenery was spectacular.  But it was an overly packaged, you're in a giant canoe with 20 other people for 15 minutes, or you're hiking 2 miles at low elevation and not seeing much.  I just wanted to stay and rent a car and really see things.  All the excursions felt frustrating, other than the whale watching, which I wasn't gung ho on doing beforehand, but  got talked into and it turned out to be incredible.

[kevwun 15255]

Yeah, definitely do the whale watching in Juneau.  We had a pair of humpbacks right next to the boat. When the first one showed up it came up and blew right behind the boat and scared the crap out of everyone with how loud it was.  The scenery there is also amazing.

[SydneyCarton 47294]

3 hours ago, gofuckyourself said:

This nails it.

We returned from my first cruise, which I agreed to participate in 90% to keep the wife happy, and 10% out of morbid curiosity. She won this trip from her first cruise this past winter with her family ... AKA if you gamble enough they want you to come back.

"Highlights" and lowlights:

- good meal in the steak restaurant. Not free. It was $49 a person and a bargain at that, with each course selection being pretty damn good. Oysters, lobster bisque soup, NY strip that was aged, well cooked and seasoned and a chocolate lava dessert with a couple of stiff drinks.

- the drinks for the entirety were all included, again part of the "you're a degenerate gambler? Please come back" treatment. Bad drinks for the most part.

- spa treatments were also very good. Discounted offer we got for showing up to a raffle thing. 75 minutes for around $130.

- entertainment was not great. The cruise director was probably the funniest person on board, see related note below. His introductions and spiels were as entertaining as anything.

- comedy was even worse than expected, and I expected putrid. The "late night adults show" consisted of an older guy laughing through his own jokes and ending with 1960s style one liners that he read from his notebook, which was the funniest bit of the night. The second guy opened with "girl you there in the front row - damn your titties are huge! I wanna put my dick between 'em and fuck 'em!" After that some more highly nuanced comedy requiring a quick wit, which we excused ourselves from to get some more culture elsewhere.

- Excursions were okay and generally very well planned and orchestrated. We went with some snorkeling around a reef and a hotel area beach spot with food/drinks included.

- Onboard water installations are bad. Three small pools crammed with kids and every hot tub somehow crammed even more with kids and teens. Some water slides. A nearby basketball court with 80 people using it. Some mini-golf and ping-pong with 30 knot winds whipping around.

- Attended an onboard art auction because we won a "guess the sculpture" prize. We chose not to purchase their $19,000 art offerings. Highlight was the pretentious art auctioneer deriding the crowd for not knowing an artist's Dali influence, and suggesting they go to Walmart to shop. So he weirdly knew, but expected otherwise, from the attendees.

Overall it was more or less exactly what I expected. I guess I can say I have personally experienced it and with ironclad certainty would 100 times out of 10 choose pay to go to any Mexican, Caribbean, South American, or probably South Dakotan resort -- rather than go on a free Wall-E "Axiom" style cruise. 

Which I will have the opportunity to choose just that, because she again "won" another "free" cruise.

Oh. I see you also cruised on Royal Caribbean. 

The art shit is beyond me. They have a whole fucking section that is paintings for sale, between the bingo hall and the fucking smokestack of a casino. Like...who's buying art, much less expensive art, on a fucking cruise ship? It's like a Chili's putting a bottle of Dom on the menu. Sir, this is a Chili's. 

Edited March 18 by SydneyCarton

[Wally Fairway 5490]

55 minutes ago, lemonlime said:

Whale watching in Juneau was phenomenal. I'd been on other whale watching trips in Maine and New Zealand, and they didn't hold a candle to Juneau.  We saw dozens of whales, really close up.

I don't have any real recommendations for other excursions.  I did a canoe trip in Ketchikan (or Skagway? it's all run together in my mind), and a hike in the other of the two, and scenery was spectacular.  But it was an overly packaged, you're in a giant canoe with 20 other people for 15 minutes, or you're hiking 2 miles at low elevation and not seeing much.  I just wanted to stay and rent a car and really see things.  All the excursions felt frustrating, other than the whale watching, which I wasn't gung ho on doing beforehand, but  got talked into and it turned out to be incredible.

The SIL that put the trip together has us on a private excursion, which means smaller ship and not 300 of us. We did something like that in Nassau last year, snorkling, remote private beach, and looking at the turtles (can't swim with them anymore because a shark ate a tourist in 2022). We could move when we wanted and didn't have to snorkle with 100 people that were on the cruise sponsored excursion. A little more expensive, but worth it.

[MonkeyDoughnut 9974]

Just got off a Virgin Cruise... definitely liked their 18+ policy. Less people getting drunk, more people just having a good time. Rooms are nicer and ship spaces have a much better design and feel.

[gofuckyourself 8057]

1 hour ago, SydneyCarton said:

Oh. I see you also cruised on Royal Caribbean. 

The art shit is beyond me. They have a whole fucking section that is paintings for sale, between the bingo hall and the fucking smokestack of a casino. Like...who's buying art, much less expensive art, on a fucking cruise ship? It's like a Chili's putting a bottle of Dom on the menu. Sir, this is a Chili's. 

Heh.

Carnival. I could only dream of experiencing the magic of RC.

[Js1 82948]

5 hours ago, gofuckyourself said:

She won this trip from her first cruise this past winter with her family ... AKA if you gamble enough they want you to come back.

This is what my dad and stepmom do. They probably go on 3 a year and at least 1 is free (a 3-5 day one). They bank their shit from the long transatlantic ones to get the free short Caribbean ones 

[Beantown Express 2.0 6509]

2 hours ago, Wally Fairway said:

The SIL that put the trip together has us on a private excursion, which means smaller ship and not 300 of us. We did something like that in Nassau last year, snorkling, remote private beach, and looking at the turtles (can't swim with them anymore because a shark ate a tourist in 2022). We could move when we wanted and didn't have to snorkle with 100 people that were on the cruise sponsored excursion. A little more expensive, but worth it.

Been on 3 Alaskan cruises in the past 6 years or so.  For Juneau I would definitely recommend whale watching as it's right in the bay so not very far and you will see tons of whales and hopefully some even jump and shit.  I have booked through Gastineau Guiding company and they do a small group tour.  They have a deal where you do the whale watch and then take you to Mendenhall glacier for a hike.  The whale watching in Juneau is great because the same whales hang out there all summer so the tours can find them pretty easily.  For Skagway we did a helicopter to the glacier and went dog sledding.  It was expensive but one of those memorable excursions.  If you do that book the first one in the morning as the weather can cause stuff like that to cancel out.   Ketchikan kind of sucks and I think it rained all 3 times I stopped there.  The best part about the Alaskan cruise is if you go to glacier bay or Hubbard glacier.  Those days are pretty spectacular if you like checking out nature.  

[Ghost of LL 15244]

18 hours ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

Been on 3 Alaskan cruises in the past 6 years or so.  For Juneau I would definitely recommend whale watching as it's right in the bay so not very far and you will see tons of whales and hopefully some even jump and shit.  I have booked through Gastineau Guiding company and they do a small group tour.  They have a deal where you do the whale watch and then take you to Mendenhall glacier for a hike.  The whale watching in Juneau is great because the same whales hang out there all summer so the tours can find them pretty easily.  For Skagway we did a helicopter to the glacier and went dog sledding.  It was expensive but one of those memorable excursions.  If you do that book the first one in the morning as the weather can cause stuff like that to cancel out.   Ketchikan kind of sucks and I think it rained all 3 times I stopped there.  The best part about the Alaskan cruise is if you go to glacier bay or Hubbard glacier.  Those days are pretty spectacular if you like checking out nature.  

 

23 hours ago, Wally Fairway said:

Following with interest - after going on our first cruise last year; a 3 day test cruise to the Bahamas out of Canaveral - it was okay), we joined in with my wife's family to to a 10 day Alaska cruise this summer. Holland America - rooms look okay, but they will be small; we upgraded to a aft veranda at the suggestion of the SIL who is putting it all together. The excursions seem pretty blah (we've been whale watching before, it's all just touristy crap), dining reviews seem to be decent and we aren't expecting 5 star meals (really not even 4 star), not sure what we will do all day on the sailing days, but I here you get a decent view of the coastline, sea and winged creatures and some blocks of ice. I am not a big drinker, but I am willing to try it out if it helps pass the time.
I am afraid if this goes well it could become a regular thing, as both of our parents have passed and it is only things like this that we get together for bigger family gatherings. I think there are about 20 of on this boat, including some from our kids generation. Personally, I think I'd rather see more of the PNW and drive around, but I don't think you can really do that as easy with Alaska.
Tips for an Alaska cruise are appreaciated - our group age range is 28-74, with most in their 50's-60's. Should I just spice it up by putting the upside down pineapple magnets on each of the groups door?

Oh, shit--I completely missed that the Alaska cruise was over the summer.  For some reason, I inferred that it was in the next couple weeks.

If it's over the summer, then you ought to check out when the salmon are running.  Ketchikan sucks generally, but there are plenty of good spots for salmon fishing around there.  Both out of Ketchikan and out of Juneau you could charter three or four boats (that would be enough for a group your size) and spend a half-day out fishing.  And the good/bad thing is that a day of salmon fishing can often turn into a few hours of orca watching (which sucks for catching salmon, because the fish aren't going to hit when they're running like hell from the orcas).  And those orcas have absolutely no fear of a small fishing boat, but they're really very curious.  You'll get really close to those bastards.

The last time I was up there we went out with Chris Condor on Rum Runner and had a ridiculously good day--we caught so many we had Fish & Game waiting on the dock for us to make sure we didn't exceed our limit and check where they were all caught.  But check in with any of those boats, and they'll round up a whole fleet for your group.

If the salmon aren't running, then I'd definitely second whale watching out of Juneau (or Ketchikan, though I'm generally less familiar with Ketchikan).  The same boats that run salmon fishing will also do whale watching tours, so you can talk with them about either.

[Guest]

Regarding Alaska, what got me was the long daylight hours. Found myself staying up later and waking up earlier just because it was bright. Around day 4, I crashed.

[CycleTex87 2944]

2 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

 

Oh, shit--I completely missed that the Alaska cruise was over the summer.  For some reason, I inferred that it was in the next couple weeks.

If it's over the summer, then you ought to check out when the salmon are running.  Ketchikan sucks generally, but there are plenty of good spots for salmon fishing around there.  Both out of Ketchikan and out of Juneau you could charter three or four boats (that would be enough for a group your size) and spend a half-day out fishing.  And the good/bad thing is that a day of salmon fishing can often turn into a few hours of orca watching (which sucks for catching salmon, because the fish aren't going to hit when they're running like hell from the orcas).  And those orcas have absolutely no fear of a small fishing boat, but they're really very curious.  You'll get really close to those bastards.

The last time I was up there we went out with Chris Condor on Rum Runner and had a ridiculously good day--we caught so many we had Fish & Game waiting on the dock for us to make sure we didn't exceed our limit and check where they were all caught.  But check in with any of those boats, and they'll round up a whole fleet for your group.

If the salmon aren't running, then I'd definitely second whale watching out of Juneau (or Ketchikan, though I'm generally less familiar with Ketchikan).  The same boats that run salmon fishing will also do whale watching tours, so you can talk with them about either.

Man I’d build a whole vacation out of just salmon fishing and whale watching.   I could spend days doing that. 

[kevwun 15255]

We are going king salmon fishing out of Sitka in August and I can't wait.

[Hagbard Celine 10515]

trip report: maiden voyage ICON OF THE SEAS

Spoiler

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Culture
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas
By Gary Shteyngart
Photographs by Gary Shteyngart
April 4, 2024

[Image: photo of Icon of the Seas, taken on a long railed path approaching the stern of the ship, with people walking along dock]

Day 1

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.
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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD, or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.
I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be suitable for conversation-starting.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this.

[Image: selfie photo of man with glasses, in background is swim-up bar with two women facing away]
The author tries to make friends at the world’s largest swim-up bar at sea. (Gary Shteyngart)

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz, an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace, who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo.

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

[Image: photo of elaborate twisting multicolored waterslides with long stairwell to platform]
The aquatic rides remind the author of his latest colonoscopy. (Gary Shteyngart)
Day 2

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.
“Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing.”

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it, I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods. There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

[Image: 2 photos: a ship's foamy white wake stretches to the horizon; a man at reailing with water and two large ships docked behind]
Left: The Icon leaves a giant wake in its path. Right: Docked at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, known as the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (Gary Shteyngart)

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED. No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia, and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME. I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality.

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus, where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

[Image: 2 photos: 2 slices of pizza on plate; man in "Daddy's Little Meatball" shirt and shorts standing in outdoor dining area with ship's exhaust stacks in background]
Left: Seafood pizza. Right: The author’s special T-shirt. (Gary Shteyngart)
Day 3

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles, it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “pendejo.” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure, and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company.

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja, I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting, natürlich. But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts. If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession. “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“Succession! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers, I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine.

[Image: photo of sheltered sandy beach with palms, umbrellas, and chairs with two large docked cruise ships in background]
Two enormous cruise ships at the Perfect Day at CocoCay, a private island with many of the same amenities as the ship itself (Gary Shteyngart)
Day 4

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful, I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.
Day 5

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.
I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my robe.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

[Image: photo from inside of spacious geodesic-style glass dome facing ocean, with stairwells and seating areas]
Inside the AquaDome, one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. (Gary Shteyngart)
Day 6

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES, which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

[Image: photo of author smiling and holding soft-serve ice-cream cone with outdoor seating area in background]
Despite the prevalence of ice cream, the author lost two pounds on the cruise. (Gary Shteyngart)
Day 7

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE. I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer. In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides. In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.
Epilogue

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue, tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

 

[RPM 26090]

I stopped reading when they were bitching about bow and stern instead of front and ass.

[squib 1112]

That author likely isn't wrong. He surely is a douche. No interest in cruising for me regardless. 

[Underdog 28118]

Alaskan Cruise is a bucket list item. 

[Hagbard Celine 10515]

3 hours ago, squib said:

That author likely isn't wrong. He surely is a douche. No interest in cruising for me regardless. 

that's the point

he wrote a cruise article that i would have written if subjected to the sheer terror of voluntary hostage mode in a dystopian buy-n-large simulation

pendejos on scooters wizzing by is an image seared in to my mind and right up there with anything ever written by The Good Doktor

[6th Street 6270]

For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit
 

[Dennis Taylor 18567]

Just found this thread, the stories of Surly .01% ers getting stuck on cruises with the poors because of (insert excuse here) are fucking hilarious. "Never again shall i be in the presence of the unwashed masses... blah blah blah."

Get over yourselves Winthorp. Reminds me that I stopped going to my class reunions because there was nothing but old people there... 

[Chewbacca 7617]

We are going king salmon fishing out of Sitka in August and I can't wait.

Who are you going with?

[Chewbacca 7617]

Just found this thread, the stories of Surly .01% ers getting stuck on cruises with the poors because of (insert excuse here) are fucking hilarious. "Never again shall i be in the presence of the unwashed masses... blah blah blah."
Get over yourselves Winthorp. Reminds me that I stopped going to my class reunions because there was nothing but old people there... 

You sound like you enjoy Carnival cruises out of Galveston.

[kevwun 15255]

Hook, Line and Sitka.  My first choice was Sea Roamer Charters because they have a really good rep, but they were booked up for all of 2024 already.  They recommended Hook, Line and Sitka so I went with them because I figured anyone they sent me to would be good.

[Chewbacca 7617]

Hook, Line and Sitka.  My first choice was Sea Roamer Charters because they have a really good rep, but they were booked up for all of 2024 already.  They recommended Hook, Line and Sitka so I went with them because I figured anyone they sent me to would be good.

Not likely to catch many Kings in August, but the Cohos will be there in force. Kings are more June and early July time frame.

[elfenix 34075]

On 4/6/2024 at 2:19 PM, Hagbard Celine said:

like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.

🤣

[MR David 3]

Norwegian Cruise Line is quite trashy, in my opinion, given the price tag. 

[Lat22 3949]

11 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

On 4/7/2024 at 3:21 PM, Dennis Taylor said:

Just found this thread, the stories of Surly .01% ers getting stuck on cruises with the poors because of (insert excuse here) are fucking hilarious. "Never again shall i be in the presence of the unwashed masses... blah blah blah."
Get over yourselves Winthorp. Reminds me that I stopped going to my class reunions because there was nothing but old people there... 

You sound like you enjoy Carnival cruises out of Galveston.

I do.  I'm a fucking Brad Pitt on those ships. 😁

[SydneyCarton 47294]

On 4/7/2024 at 3:21 PM, Dennis Taylor said:

Just found this thread, the stories of Surly .01% ers getting stuck on cruises with the poors because of (insert excuse here) are fucking hilarious. "Never again shall i be in the presence of the unwashed masses... blah blah blah."

Get over yourselves Winthorp. Reminds me that I stopped going to my class reunions because there was nothing but old people there... 

Why? Do you go out of your way being in places or around people who's company you don't enjoy? Watch a lot of college football  games solely in the company of aggies and sooners, do you?

[ScottS 1043]

What is their Surly handle?

We’re addicted to naked cruises and have already spent $40K — here’s why we’ll never do a clothed one again

Quote

Strips ahoy.

A couple who have embarked on nine clothing-optional cruises claim to love them much, they’ll never set sail the standard way again.

“I told my wife that from here on out I won’t do any clothed cruises,” Michael Brown, 56, a retired government enforcement officer from Wilmington, Delaware, told SWNS.

Brown and wife Laurie, 50, have been nudists for their entire 20-year marriage. They spend the majority of their time at home in their birthday suits. They cook, clean, eat and are raising their two children, aged 12 and 14, sans attire.

The duo decided to take their NSFW lifestyle to the high seas by going on sex-pensive cruises specifically chartered for sealoving Adams and Eves.

“It’s the polar opposite of a clothed cruise,” Michael explained matter-of-factly, describing the pastime’s appeal. “You’re paying for the premium of being naked.”

After embarking on their inaugural nude voyage in 2015 for a couple’s vacation, the duo has gone on one of these floating bacchanalias every year since.

To date, they’ve dropped $40,000 on the pants-free pilgrimages, which have taken them everywhere from Aruba to the Dominican Republic.

Their latest seven-day cruise — run by a company called Bare Necessities — departed Florida, sailed around Mexico and Honduras, and set the nautical nudists back $2,000 each.

What does one do aboard this floating nude beach? Basically, you enjoy all of the same cruise activities — yoga, gym sessions, photography sessions, comedy sets, shows, and gambling in the casino — just without attire.

Nudists can even work up a sweat – much like these naked exercise enthusiasts — by enjoying the “big slides, the waterpark, putt putt golf and a running track,” Michael explained.

Unfortunately, not every part of the boat is clothing optional; voyagers are required to wear attire while dining.

“If you’re in sit-down dining rooms or paid restaurants, they ask you to be clothed but in the buffet, you’re welcome to be naked,” Michael said.

“You can be eating dinner at the sushi restaurant in clothes and you’re watching people marching back naked back and forth outside, which seems a bit hypocritical,” he pointed out.

There are also certain areas where pleasure boaters aren’t allowed to snap photos, specifically the ninth deck where the pool and sun loungers are located.

Despite the “Playboy Mansion”-evoking environment, hanky panky is verboten aboard the voyages.

“They are pretty strict on the fact that it’s a naturist environment…there’s no sexual activity at all,” warned Michael.

What’s the appeal of the pastime? Michael said he finds nude cruisers much friendlier than their clothes-on counterparts.

“I find people to be rude on clothed cruises and everyone has their face in a phone,” he told a reporter. He added that by, contrast these nude cruisers are “courteous and hyper-aware of being kind and friendly.”

“A lot of clothed cruisers go for the ship, or the harmony of the sea, whereas the nude cruise its the opposite,” he added. “It’s not about the boat — you’re going because of the people and the friends you’re going to meet.”

Michael claims that he even met two of his closest friends aboard a nude cruise.

The voyages have been a high water mark for Michael, who has been a nudist ever since he was a young kid.

“My mother was always chasing me around trying to get clothes on me,” said the Delawarean, who baptized his wife into the lifestyle.

“My wife was also comfortable with going topless but never full social nudism,” he explained. “So when we got married, I introduced her to her first nude experience and that was pretty much it.”

He added, “She was very apprehensive about it when we got together but she took to the idea of it very quickly.”

The couple are even raising their kids to be nudists as well.

“With our kids, it was a process that both my wife and I agreed upon jointly,” he said.  “I wanted to raise good respectful, well-balanced, body positive daughters.

Contrary to the stripteaser-like stigma surrounding the practice, Michael says going clothes-free is conversely about “removing the mystery and mystique behind it.”

Their training appears to be having the desired effect.

“Our eldest is 14 and our youngest 12 — they now don’t bat an eye at nude people,” Michael said.

There are pictures in the linked article for the curious.

[Wally Fairway 5490]

12 minutes ago, ScottS said:

 

There are pictures in the linked article for the curious.

yeah - I am going to pass on clicking on that link

[smokebomb 357]

1 hour ago, ScottS said:

What is their Surly handle?

We’re addicted to naked cruises and have already spent $40K — here’s why we’ll never do a clothed one again

There are pictures in the linked article for the curious.

The travel agency that runs those nude cruises, Bare Necessities, is actually based out of Austin. Maybe they have a Surly handle?

[Deej 76156]

On 4/13/2024 at 10:27 AM, smokebomb said:

Maybe they have a Surly handle?

NowThis?

[Wally Fairway 5490]

On 3/18/2024 at 1:03 PM, Wally Fairway said:

Following with interest - after going on our first cruise last year; a 3 day test cruise to the Bahamas out of Canaveral - it was okay), we joined in with my wife's family to to a 10 day Alaska cruise this summer. Holland America - rooms look okay, but they will be small; we upgraded to a aft veranda at the suggestion of the SIL who is putting it all together. The excursions seem pretty blah (we've been whale watching before, it's all just touristy crap), dining reviews seem to be decent and we aren't expecting 5 star meals (really not even 4 star), not sure what we will do all day on the sailing days, but I here you get a decent view of the coastline, sea and winged creatures and some blocks of ice. I am not a big drinker, but I am willing to try it out if it helps pass the time.
I am afraid if this goes well it could become a regular thing, as both of our parents have passed and it is only things like this that we get together for bigger family gatherings. I think there are about 20 of on this boat, including some from our kids generation. Personally, I think I'd rather see more of the PNW and drive around, but I don't think you can really do that as easy with Alaska.
Tips for an Alaska cruise are appreaciated - our group age range is 28-74, with most in their 50's-60's. Should I just spice it up by putting the upside down pineapple magnets on each of the groups door?

Just back from our travels - 7 day cruise out of Seattle, 2.5 days before seeing North Cascade NP, 1.5 days after quick trip to Olympia NP/Hurricane Ridge & Dungeness National WR. Overall a good trip, spent with mainly with my wife's family & our kiddo who lives in Seattle.
Didn't really try to keep up on the news, wanted to treat this as an escape ..... but holy shit, on Pres candidate shot, the other quit, bunch of airlines went to shit (only affected a couple of folks from our group), and luckily the fire in North Cascade was a few days after we were on the ship (I swear it wasn't me). 
We were lucky as our days in port were a break from the daily rains they have been having, but on the water it just looking at fog almost all day.

[txduck87 972]

Norwegian Cruise Line is quite trashy, in my opinion, given the price tag. 

We did a cruise with them in their “haven” suites. Stayed away from the masses on a private floor and the food was great. One and done for me though.
Except for an Alaskan cruise.

[Ghost of LL 15244]

We got done last month with a three-week cruise on Silversea from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal.  It was definitely not trashy.  And we got to see @Pescado_Rojo in Cabo, so that was fun.

We were traveling with the kids, and we had two suites (all of the rooms on Silversea are suites), but they weren't connecting and were a bit down the hall from one another.  So about two weeks before the cruise, the agent calls me up and says, "Hey, Mr. GOLL, good news--there's an upgrade available to the two-bedroom Owners' suite for a price of just eleventy trillion dollars."  And, I mean--why not?

So at this point in the review, may I suggest you cue up the Vivaldi to play in the background as you read further:

 

So here's the deal with Silversea: everything is included.  Ok--pretty much everything.  The drinks are included, the gratuities are included, one shore excursion at each stop is included.  There are certain premium drinks that cost extra.  If you want a cigar in the cigar bar, those are extra.  There is one restaurant that has a $60 pp cover charge.  But yeah--pretty much once you step on that boat, you can throw your wallet in the safe and never touch it again.

Another thing with Silversea is the service.  On our ship, the Silver Shadow, there are about 350 passengers and 300 crew members, so you have close to a 1-1 passenger-to-crew ratio.  Each suite has its own butler, of whom you can ask the most absurd requests.  I asked for caviar service and a fresh bottle of champagne in the room every evening at 6:00--I mean, it's included, after all--and it was done.  And with so few passengers, the crew pretty quickly figures out your name and what your preferences are.  It took them about two days to figure out that I was going to want a dirty Grey Goose martini with three blue cheese olives at the beginning of every dinner.  By the end of the first week, they just stopped asking--it just appeared a few minutes after I sat down.

As you can imagine, all this comes at a price.  So yeah--that's another deal with Silversea: it's fantastically expensive.

A by-product of that is that it attracts an older crowd.  My kids were the only kids on the ship.  And they were kind of a novelty--that ship obviously doesn't see a lot of kids.  The passengers ranged from about 45 to 75, with most being between probably 55 and 70.  It was about a third Americans/Canadians, a third British, and a third various other countries (a fair number of Germans and Swiss, a handful of Australians, probably six French, and a couple of Finns--the Finns were a fucking blast).

With that kind of crowd--i.e., an international crowd that can afford that type of cruise--it's kind of the opposite of other cruises I've been on, where you kind of put your head down and try to avoid interacting with any of these people.  On this cruise, the other passengers were fascinating.  I mean, some of them were fucking wild.  Olga the rich tech widow from Monterey was one of the more interesting people I've ever met.

So yeah--all y'all fancy Surly-ites who don't want to deal with trashy cruise lines, . . . maybe check that out.

[kevwun 15255]

I looked in to them after a travel guy on Youtube I follow went on a Silversea cruise.  It's amazing, but the price was just too much for us to justify.  We could take like 4 trip of a lifetime type jaunts for what 1 cruise would cost us.

[Pescado_Rojo 19235]

17 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

We got done last month with a three-week cruise on Silversea from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal.  It was definitely not trashy.  And we got to see @Pescado_Rojo in Cabo, so that was fun.

We were traveling with the kids, and we had two suites (all of the rooms on Silversea are suites), but they weren't connecting and were a bit down the hall from one another.  So about two weeks before the cruise, the agent calls me up and says, "Hey, Mr. GOLL, good news--there's an upgrade available to the two-bedroom Owners' suite for a price of just eleventy trillion dollars."  And, I mean--why not?

So at this point in the review, may I suggest you cue up the Vivaldi to play in the background as you read further:

 

So here's the deal with Silversea: everything is included.  Ok--pretty much everything.  The drinks are included, the gratuities are included, one shore excursion at each stop is included.  There are certain premium drinks that cost extra.  If you want a cigar in the cigar bar, those are extra.  There is one restaurant that has a $60 pp cover charge.  But yeah--pretty much once you step on that boat, you can throw your wallet in the safe and never touch it again.

Another thing with Silversea is the service.  On our ship, the Silver Shadow, there are about 350 passengers and 300 crew members, so you have close to a 1-1 passenger-to-crew ratio.  Each suite has its own butler, of whom you can ask the most absurd requests.  I asked for caviar service and a fresh bottle of champagne in the room every evening at 6:00--I mean, it's included, after all--and it was done.  And with so few passengers, the crew pretty quickly figures out your name and what your preferences are.  It took them about two days to figure out that I was going to want a dirty Grey Goose martini with three blue cheese olives at the beginning of every dinner.  By the end of the first week, they just stopped asking--it just appeared a few minutes after I sat down.

As you can imagine, all this comes at a price.  So yeah--that's another deal with Silversea: it's fantastically expensive.

A by-product of that is that it attracts an older crowd.  My kids were the only kids on the ship.  And they were kind of a novelty--that ship obviously doesn't see a lot of kids.  The passengers ranged from about 45 to 75, with most being between probably 55 and 70.  It was about a third Americans/Canadians, a third British, and a third various other countries (a fair number of Germans and Swiss, a handful of Australians, probably six French, and a couple of Finns--the Finns were a fucking blast).

With that kind of crowd--i.e., an international crowd that can afford that type of cruise--it's kind of the opposite of other cruises I've been on, where you kind of put your head down and try to avoid interacting with any of these people.  On this cruise, the other passengers were fascinating.  I mean, some of them were fucking wild.  Olga the rich tech widow from Monterey was one of the more interesting people I've ever met.

So yeah--all y'all fancy Surly-ites who don't want to deal with trashy cruise lines, . . . maybe check that out.

Pics of Olga? 

[Ghost of LL 15244]

1 hour ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Pics of Olga? 

You know--I just went through my camera roll, and I don't think I have any.  I'll have to ask Mrs.LL.

She was one of those women who you honestly couldn't tell how old she was.  She could've been 50.  But she also might've been 75.  I just don't know.  Which might be a credit to her plastic surgeon.  But did she have plastic surgery?  I really couldn't tell.

And then you'd chat with her, and she might just be dressed in a white shirt and jeans.  All very casual and stylish.  But then you looked closer, and you figured out that the shirt probably cost $2,000.  I mean, it didn't have a designer name plastered all over it to let you know it was expensive.  It took a trained eye--and Mrs.LL has a very trained eye.

Just a fascinating person.

[Chopper 16341]

On 7/25/2024 at 10:16 AM, Pescado_Rojo said:

Pics of Olga? 

The wife and I are scheduled for a Silversea cruise around Japan and to S Korea in October. A travel agent out of Monterey/Pacific Grove organized a group so I will keep an eye out for Olga. I was firmly in the Never Will I Cruise camp but got talked into it. Our ship is a bit larger, about 720 passengers. The ship is a year old with an asymmetrical design.

Thanks for the review, @Ghost of LL!

 

[UncleBuck 6442]

Looks like I might be the odd man out, but I fucking loved our cruise and can't wait to go back. It was even with Carnival, which might be the shittiest cruise line but the people watching is A+. Swimming on the ship looks tight, but frankly I'm not there to swim, I'm there to drink and eat Guy's Burgers and whatever else I can find all day while my kids are 1,000 miles away and I have absolutely zero responsibilities. We did a few excursions: Saw some midget pyramids; Snorkeled and jet-ski'd for a bit; Then of course Mr. Sancho's in Cozumel. Snorkeling was cool. Jet skis are jet skis. Pyramids were nice, but I think I've seen and done enough of that for a lifetime. So next time, outside of Mr. Sancho's, I think I'll skip the excursions and play hide and seek from my wife for seven days on that giant assed boat. 

Also I hate flying, so this works out a lot better. 

Edited July 26 by UncleBuck

[Chopper 16341]

 

[Borachio 416]

Sailing on the Icon of the Seas the first week of Oct out of Miami. My girlfriend is a big cruiser and wanted to try this ship. Hopefully our time is better than the traveler in the article above! 

[BamaATL 16007]

To say that this has been an informative read with a surly slant of humor would be an understatement.  My wife and I have both never been on a cruise and we are thinking of trying the Norwegian, with a Haven suite. For those that have done this, did you find it worth it?  Also, it sort seems like the cruise industry is entirely modeled on the "old man rip you off" business model; i.e. they aim to get you at every turn.  We don't mind paying the extra to be a bit off the radar to the riff raff, but not sure if that is really worth it or not.  Neither of us do particularly well in crowds for extended periods, and the idea that we can retreat to more serenity and calm is quite appealing. 

Additionally, neither of us do particularly well with just lounging around, and neither of us drink (we also don't gamble).  With that in mind, are we going to be bored to tears doing this?  I've always wanted to visit the Virgin Islands, both British and American, and we think we've found a cruise that does that.  I do have some pause because it seems like you just sort of get off the ship, do some random crap, and get right back on, without ever really seeing anything.  Does that seem about right?

Also, why the fuck would I have a butler, which apparently comes with this?  In my mind I keep thinking I'm just gonna have some weirdo hanging out in my room for no apparent reason.  I'm gonna have a hard enough time trying to convince my wife not to try to find a vacuum (she finds cleaning comforting).  

The industry is confusing and irritating as fuck, you will find "all inclusive" pricing, but every turn there are stipulations and exclusions, basically a bunch of marketing nonsense to get you on the ship and then just constantly hit you up for more and more.  I'm guessing I have that part right.  So budget for time and a half the final "price"?