Tuesday, September 22, 2009

It's all about comparisons

So, in my last blog post I ended our cruise summary by telling you I will probably not go on a cruise ever again. You curious to hear why? Tuff, you’re going to hear it anyway through my list of pros and cons.

Pro: Cheap transportation to many different destinations – it seriously would have cost $6000 in airfare each to visit each spot. Not worth it.

Con: We only got to spend a few hours at each destination. Shad and I are engineers and thus very good at setting a very ambitious schedule and accomplishing it, that’s just not the way I like my vacations. I like to take my time and have less of a plan and more time just exploring. On the plus side, the spots we didn’t really love, we only were there for a few hours.

Pro: Copious amounts of food all the time. Now this is the number one thing people raved about while talking about their previous cruise experiences. I don’t know where these people eat normally but the food was not of good quality, even in the fancy dining room. Seriously it is convenient to go get pizza whenever the thought occurs to you, but is it really that hard to get pizza on a daily basis outside of a cruise? For me it is not. I guess for other people it is.

Con: Eating with strangers for dinner every night. On cruises typically when you eat in the dining room you have an assigned table with your fellow cruise passengers. I pictured a large round table when I thought about this situation. Not a cozy booth with one other couple we had never seen before in our lives. It’s much harder to ignore the others at the table and talk amongst yourselves when you are staring directly at two strangers two feet away from you. This was our situation. Enter Hannah and Christian from Chicago (originally Poland). Chicago is rising fast on my least favorite places ever – it will never replace Wyoming but it might come close. Hannah and Christian both work in the financial sector in securities or something. They both hate cruising yet have been on several. They hate the food on the cruise ship, they hate the cheesy activities, they don’t go swimming in the pool and go to bed by 9:00. On our days at sea, we had to hear how bored they were the entire day. We had to hear about all the things the cruise line used to do but have cut back on. During the days we stopped at places, we got to hear about their scuba diving trip (that’s all they did at every port) and then the annoying things that happened to them while on land and then lastly, the told us what we did wrong on our excursions for the day. Seriously best night of the cruise was the night we got back from port too late and opted to shower instead of rushing to dinner.

Pro: Towel animals. Who doesn’t love a good towel animal with turndown service?

Con: It’s loud. I didn’t get a good night sleep the entire time on the cruise. The walls are thin and with people walking and stewards rolling carts up and down the hall all hours of the night, it was my worst nightmare. I was so happy to get home to our silent house to actually sleep.

Pro: We made new Australian friends. On our way to the port on the shuttle from the hotel we bonded with a cute couple over the less than fancy hotel we stayed in the night before. Throughout the check in day, we kept on running into them. They’re names were Matt and Bella and we had a blast hanging out with them for a lot of the time on the ship. It was nice to share our time with a young couple that didn’t hate cruising. They even had a few incidents that required medical attention and that still didn’t get them down. (Bella twisted her ankle on the water slide at Margaritaville in Grand Cayman and Matt cut his head and had to get stitches in Roatan after a shop awning fell on it.)

Con: People everywhere. I don’t really like people and on the ship beside you’re really loud stateroom, you have no option but to be surrounded by them. I couldn’t help to think back to our honeymoon in Cabo where we saw a maximum of 5 people in our resort the entire week. That was bliss.

There you go. There are a ton of other places in the world Shad and I are dying to see and chances are good we won’t be seeing them anytime soon from a cruise ship.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, this is Brad once again. So I am auditing your pros and cons. I pretty much agree with all your pros so you can see where i'm going with this :-)

    Amy and I did a super cheap cruise thing for our honey moon and loved it! One of the biggest reasons we loved it is because they forced us to sit at a table with 2 other couples. They were the coolest people ever! We're pretty much lifelong friends now (on facebook) with this couple from South Africa. At the time they were totally anti baby and we would say how we're getting started pretty quick, and now they have a baby and we make fun of their old state of mind.... anyways, the other couple were from Nevada, oh and they were lesbians. It was so fun to see them come to dinner after getting drunk and fighting with other cruise people at a Mexian bar!

    Anyways, so we got lucky and loved our dining partner people.

    And that sucks how it was loud for you guys, our room was the cheapest one possible. It had no window, so once you got inside and turned off the lights it was pitch black and deafly silent. yeah... very much opposite how you described.

    And the fact that you only have a couple hours at the destination spots is the one thing we'll agree on. It sucks. Plus you're stuck only seeing the tourist places too. While we were in Ensenada, I grabbed Amy and we pretty much walked as far away as we could from the city and we ended up playing around at the cathedral and grocery stores. But yeah, If you want to see the world don't do a cruise. If you want to be lazy and gain 10 happy pounds, a cruise is for you.

    The end.

    -brad

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