Today your Mushroom City Memoirs columnist, Gale Hammond, fills you in on all you need to know about … er, excuse me … we just returned from an “adventure at sea” (a.k.a. “cruise”), and I must learn to talk like a normal person again. After keeping company with “Snowball Scotty” and “Bruce,” our naturalist, for the past week, I am desperately trying to check my enthusiasm.
The reason for this exuberance is that my spouse and I, having recently married off Daughter Number Two of Two, signed up for a cruise to Alaska – or as we like to think of it – our “Free At Last” tour. If you have yet to try a cruise, I highly recommend it.
Perhaps you are thinking – “But I can’t take a cruise. I need to take off 20 pounds to venture out into public wearing my string bikini.” To this I reply – Hahahaha! Because let’s just say not all of the larger mammals you spot will be in the sea. Granted, there are “party cruises” for singles and for those whose day isn’t complete without a few self-congratulatory biceps curls, but when you cruise Alaska in September, nobody ventures anywhere without major parkas and numerous layers of thermal undies, rendering passengers into pretty fair replicas of Mama Cass in her fat pants.
Regardless of your destination, one unfortunate fact about cruising is you can forget any semblance of a good hair day. For me and those like me whose hair undergoes many strange and wondrous mutations in mist and high humidity, know that your given intimate proximity to the ocean, not to mention the high-winds factor, guarantees you and your cruise mates will generally roam about resembling the cast from “Godspell,” only in bulkier clothing.
Unruly hair aside, there are several elements of cruising you won’t find in the colorful brochures supplied by your travel agent. Therefore, be advised of a few important safety tips.
First, there is the “mandatory” life boat drill. The ship’s personnel are all fired up about how this maneuver saves lives should the ship go down for some reasonable cause such as all the passengers selected the Baked Alaska on Friday night because let’s face it – some mighty big ships have gone down with less provocation than a few hundred gallons of meringue and hot fudge. Au contraire; anyone with half a brain knows the real reason for the life boat drill is those blasted jackets you must get into before marching to the deck for public ridicule.
Life jackets come in one color – International Orange (motto: We can see you from space!), and even if you are a size “Minus Two,” life jackets render you into a Goodyear Blimp with legs. Grudgingly, at the prearranged signal we obediently don our jackets and troop up on deck to our lifeboat stations, an inordinate number of stray straps and buckles dragging along behind us, causing sparks to fly as various metal pieces clank along the non-skid surface of the deck. The crew, attempting to keep straight faces as hapless life-jacketed passengers bounce off one another like bumper cars, waits for the moment when the drill is over and they can scoot back to their quarters where their stifled guffaws explode into howls of hilarity, and they are rolling helplessly on the floor with laughter.
“Whooooaaa, Hans!! Did you see that one crazy guy?” shrieks your cabin steward. He tried to tie his straps to the toilet seat in his stateroom so he wouldn’t have to go to his designated lifeboat area!”
“Ja, Sven, but the idiotic lady in 817 thought she could dodge the drill by covering herself in plastic wrap and passing herself off as an ice sculpture.”
One of your cruise highlights will be the rare opportunity to meet the ship’s captain in person at a champagne reception and pose for a picture with the master of your vessel. I was all for this until it dawned on me that if we were rubbing elbows with the captain, obviously he wasn’t on the bridge with both hands on the wheel.
“So – who’s driving the ship?” I greeted our skipper when my spouse and I were introduced to this gentleman whose commanding intercom voice didn’t quite match the slight chap with the thinning hair we were face-to-face with now.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he shot back.
I was beginning to like this guy.
Unless you were fortunate enough to have been born a crustacean, your main shipboard challenge is developing what is comically referred to as “sea legs” as passengers attempt to traverse a vessel cruising over unpredictable waters.
Say you’re traveling in the direction of the dining room exit. Should your ship experience a sudden shift in course, try to fall so that your back is away from other diners, thereby avoiding an unfortunate face plant in Table 32’s venison medallions flambe. Later on in your cruise, you will enjoy gathering with other passengers to compare shiners, bumps and contusions suffered while crashing about your stateroom or accumulated on the awkward occasion when you attempted to plot a forward course through more public domains and abruptly found yourself listing violently starboard into the slow path of one of the ship’s octogenarian voyagers.
I hope you, too, will soon experience the “motion of the ocean” and head for the high seas and bountiful buffets. And, Ladies and Gentlemen – whatever you do – have a wonderful afternoon and I’ll see you again soon for another fun report from your “fungus columnist.”
Gale Hammond is a 23-year Morgan Hill resident. Reach her at
Ga*********@ao*.com
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