The Wife and I had cruised together once before. It was a couple of years ago. We hated it.
That cruise was to Mexico, but it wasn’t Mexico’s fault. We love Mexico. And it wasn’t the cruise line’s fault. If it had been, I’d name the cruise line — but they did everything they could to make us happy except let us cheat at bingo, and everyone else had a wonderful time.
Our friends all have wonderful times on cruises. Maybe we just did it wrong.
We had to take another look. This one was to the Caribbean.
Here’s the look.
Day 1: Embarkation
Boarding Celebrity Cruise’s Galaxy was much, much faster than our first experience. So here’s our insider tip: Read the schedule wrong. We did, got there two hours later than the official boarding time and missed the crowd. Of course, there’s a certain risk in doing that…
Our cabin, on Deck 4 near the bottom of both the ship and the rate scale, was about the size of the interior of a midsize RV, without the stove but with better closets. Our tour of the cabin completed in 18 seconds, we had the rest of the afternoon to see the ship.
We discovered quickly that the Galaxy had 12 bars. The Ocean Bar, on the pool deck, featured three drinks: the blue, the yellow and the orange. The blue and the orange had little umbrellas. I ordered a clear vodka and tonic, and we were joined at the bar by Patty and Al. Patty was a decorator. Al already had a terrific tan, which figured, since he was from Buffalo. After 5 minutes, Patty, Al, The Wife and I were best of friends, and we hoped we’d be seated together at dinner for the rest of the cruise instead of with…well…
On our maiden cruise, we were put at a table for six. One couple was a woman from California who didn’t say much and her Hawaiian boyfriend, a retired Navy man who spent most of the cruise seasick, which seemed curious for a retired Navy man from an island.
And there were two women from Montana, both maybe 90 and both named Cleo. One of the Cleos was just about deaf. It made for interesting conversations, many of which went very much like this: “SHE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU LIKE HORSES!”
And there was us.
Back to the present: Our dinner companions on the Galaxy’s first night — permanent tables weren’t to be assigned until later — were two Canadian women whose Canadian husbands had already tried 11 of the 12 bars and had gotten totally shnockered. Their whereabouts were unknown, though it was almost certain they were still on the ship.
“We figure they owe us,” said one of the women.
When dinner was over, the four of us all hoped we’d be seated together for the rest of the cruise.
Later, in the Celebrity Theater — the main showroom — everybody was introduced to the people who would be entertaining us for the week: a male singer, a female singer, a singing male quartet, a Hungarian husband-wife dance team, the Celebrity Singers and Dancers (various genders) and a troupe of guys introduced as “Our Chinese Acrobats.”
Then it was back up to Deck 11, the one with the pools, for the traditional Almost Midnight Sailaway Poolside Deck Party, featuring lots of people drinking umbrellaed drinks, plenty of loud music and sporadic dancing. Soon, the ship began slowly easing away from the dock to the romantic strains of “That’s the Way (Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh) I Like It (Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh).”
And as the Galaxy slid past the picturesque loading docks of Old San Juan — the wind picked up. The pools, which had been quiet and blue, suddenly developed whitecaps.
“Oh, boy,” sighed a man nearby, grabbing a rail. “Here we go. Swaying and rolling…”
Yet while he was anticipating projectiles, hundreds of people were bouncing along the deck in a conga line, and hundreds more were gorging on chicken, ribs and whatever else was out there at this cruise’s first Midnight Buffet.
From Deck 12, virtually alone, we watched all this in terror. We were on a trip, uh-huh, uh-huh, but not the way we liked it.
A week of this?
Conga lines?
Day 2: At sea
Sea days, we’ve been told, are for relaxation. Grab a deck chair, get some sun, read a little, sip a rum drink, grab a bite, order a beer, get some sun, think about dinner. Veteran cruise people love days at sea.
The rain held off until after the 10:15 a.m. lifeboat drill. Then it poured.
The Wife, whose expectations were being confirmed, went straight to the gym and worked it off on a treadmill. I scanned the daily offerings in the Galaxy Daily — the ship’s bulletin — and there it was: Country Line Dancing Class.
“One-two, one-two-three, left turn,” said Lisa, whose country was England. “All you’re doing,” she said while doing it, “is doing the same thing around each side. Just remember — the last kick you do, you always come to the right.”
Everyone remembered, and despite the kicks, there were no injuries. Lisa taught us a variation. I stayed until one move required the shouting of “Yee-haw!” There are limits — and besides, the sun was back.
We got chairs on Deck 12, above the pools. Down at poolside, just after the ship’s culinary staff did some remarkable things with turnips, there followed a “pool game” that involved wet T-shirts that wasn’t nearly as interesting as it could have been.
Later that afternoon, The Wife met The Spa.
For a small fee, she was wrapped in seaweed, sage and aluminum foil, which is supposed to have therapeutic benefits but sounds like something you do to a potato. Then she was unwrapped and half-body massaged (I didn’t ask which half) with aeromatic oils. List price: $160. And to complete the treatment, she was warned by the massage lady that unless she bought several jars of expensive miracle potions, at The Spa, her skin would develop many of the characteristics of a withered shiitake mushroom.
The Wife bought no jars. And gave no tip.
Dinner was formal. We were invited to dine at the Galaxy captain’s table, a privilege generally reserved for frequent customers, celebrities, good-looking babes and, I suppose, potentially influential journalists. To maintain ethical purity, I wore the cummerbund on my rented tuxedo upside down. I think.
Among those at that table were qualifiers Michael, Marc, Pat and Sue, who — like us — didn’t take any of this seriously; the captain, who didn’t seem to mind that we weren’t taking any of this seriously; and Raymond and Ellen, who not only were very nice but had been upgraded to a penthouse and promised to invite us up for a drink sometime, which made them dear friends.
The evening’s show in the Celebrity Theater, “The Hollywood Years” (a movie tribute), was decent, especially the “Wizard of Oz” part in which Our Chinese Acrobats played munchkins. In another segment, the featured singer was almost through her solo when Michael, from the captain’s table, leaned over.
“Should we be concerned,” he whispered, “that she’s singing the theme from `Titanic’?”
This cruise had promise.
Day 3: St. Lucia
Cruises offer what are called “shore excursions.” They are tours, or they are organized parties, or they are combinations of the two. You pay extra for them, and sometimes they’re worth it. And sometimes they’re a microcosm of what’s wrong with seeing the world by cruise ship.
We booked the “La Soufriere and the Pitons by Land and Sea” shore excursion. It was scheduled for seven hours and lasted eight, and cost us $70 each.
Was it great? Well, a few dozen of us spent all morning on a motorized catamaran buzzing the island’s western shore. Some drank rum drinks (included) or beer (extra). A few danced to recorded music. Some caught a little sun.
We sailed into Marigot Bay, which was beautiful, then sailed right out, which was frustrating. We pulled into another cove and swam off the catamaran, but the cat wasn’t equipped with snorkeling gear — those who brought their own said the fish were great — and that was a little frustrating too.
We passed fishing villages and never got close to them. When we finally did land at one, the potentially interesting village of Soufriere (in the shadow of the croquette-shaped Pitons), we were immediately hustled from the boat onto several buses and out of town, and that was plain wrong.
So in eight hours, we got a party boat (with another conga line), an intimate buffet lunch for 100 (counting strangers from another bus tour) and a group walk through a botanical garden. The only time we heard Creole — the working language of locals whose roots aren’t European, which is most of them — was when one of our tour guides sang us a Creole song on the bus. Which was sweet.
She followed that by coaxing the passengers into singing that island classic “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”
We weren’t, and we didn’t.
At dinner, we met the two couples who would be our Assigned Dining Companions for the rest of the cruise. Dinner conversation included a threatened divorce (not us) and a near-fistfight over whether Washington people would actually pay good money to see Michael Jordan in a suit.
Our headwaiter brought over a birthday cake and we were serenaded, in honor of my birthday. It was a nice surprise, especially because it wasn’t my birthday.
Dinner ended with The Wife asking, “Do we really have to eat with those people again?”
We missed Cleo and, especially, Cleo.
And the evening’s show was “The Magic and Illusions of Zoltan.” He was very good. He made Our Chinese Acrobats disappear.
Day 4: Barbados
We had pre-booked another excursion, and it was too late to get a refund. This was to be a four-hour morning island drive ($54 per person) that would include a visit to Harrison’s Cave and the Flower Forest.
The cave was a cave. The Flower Forest, just another botanical garden, was a blooming bore. A walk through a snake-infested field of Barbados sugar cane might have at least brought us to a place we’d never been before . . . but no. And our guide, Harold, wasn’t exactly a torrent of joyous patter.
“Palms on the left — coconuts. Coconuts,” Harold said. A mile later: “Trees on the left — mahogany. Mahogany.” A mile later: “These are roundabouts. Roundabouts.”
Round about noon, we were happy to be out of the bus and back on the Galaxy. The Wife grabbed a book and found a deck chair. I grabbed a chance to explore without the pack.
Bridgetown, the capital, is reached by taking a free shuttle from the ship to a shop-lined (naturally) bus terminal, then a $4 cab ride into town. On the shuttle, a woman from the Galaxy and I compared mornings. She was ecstatic. She and her husband had gone into town and hired a taxi driver to take them around.
“His name was Ian, and he was great,” she said. “We saw both sides of the island and everything. “
Two hours had cost them $50, and this woman had come back beaming about Barbados and its people. We had paid $108 for a middling cave and Bored Harold.
In downtown Bridgetown, I talked to taxi drivers. Any number of them would’ve been great tour guides for a couple of hours — or, for that matter, charming guests at our Assigned Dinner Table.
“You didn’t see a lot on the bus, did you?” said a driver named Trevor. “To me, it’s a ripoff.”
“With us,” said another driver, named Dave, “it’s your two hours. We go where you want to go. When you want to stop, we stop. You want to stop and take a picture, we stop and take a picture, for as long as you like.
“And you’re one-on-one with the driver. We answer all the questions you want to ask. Oh — and it’s cheaper.”
I shook Dave’s hand and thanked him for his time — but he held the grip.
“Now,” he said, “let me ask you a question. Why did you go with the ship and not with us?”
Because, I said, I didn’t know this option existed. He said it’s because the ships’ staffs scare passengers.
“They prey on the weakness, on the ignorance of people,” Dave said. “They do it to get people to book their excursions.”
I looked up Steve Roman, shore excursion manager on the Galaxy.
“I’ve been here for seven, eight years, and they’ve been saying that for seven, eight years,” he said. “When someone asks me if they can take a cab, I say `By all means.'”
Which is true. I actually heard it later. And on the in-cabin videos through which he details the ship’s excursions, Roman says nothing negative at all about the islanders or the drivers. His only reference to taxis: “On all these islands, there are more cabs than people, so don’t ever worry about getting a cab.”
“Obviously,” Roman told me, “I’m selling a service, and it’s a little expensive — but it’s really easy to do.”
I believe Steve Roman. We canceled our Antigua excursion.
Dinner. We ate with those people again — but now that everyone was relaxed, they turned out to be gracious dining companions, interesting and entertaining. The headwaiter brought a birthday cake to the table and we were serenaded, in honor of my birthday. This time he was right.
The evening’s show was a performance by Jordan Bennett. He was Valjean in a Los Angeles production of “Les Miserables,” and on this night he would be Valjean, Tevye and the Phantom of the Opera, and his performance was absolutely goosebumpy.
Our Chinese Acrobats had the night off.
And after the show, on the pool deck, hundreds danced, limboed, congaed and bounced to music from the band. That went on well after midnight. We ran into Marc and Michael, then Pat showed up, and we laughed a lot, but we didn’t dance, limbo or conga. Oh, no.
But there was beginning to be just a little bit of bounce…
Day 5: Martinique
The Wife and I got off the ship after breakfast and walked around town. Just us.
The Galaxy Daily described Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique, as “reminiscent of New Orleans’ French Quarter,” which turned out to be a little like saying Omaha is reminiscent of Chicago — but just being on our own was a relief. We especially enjoyed a little street market where old women with heads wrapped in bright bandanas joyously gave us local names for the fruits, vegetables and spices — some familiar, some a total mystery — for sale on their tables.
We would have lingered in town, enjoyed a lunch of local delicacies and perhaps a quiet beer, but we had booked a 1 p.m. shore excursion. There was no getting out of this one, which didn’t thrill us — except, by now, we were discovering something about cruises: Friendships happen.
Through no fault of our own, we now were chummy with the Canadians from that first-night dinner, as well as their husbands, who had rallied; Pat the decorator and her husband, Al; everyone from the captain’s table dinner but especially the four civilians on our end, who were a hoot; a Yankee fan from Boston and his wife; our dinner companions, who were now among our favorite people in the world; and about 400 other passengers we now knew through elevator conversations, common excursions, bar talk and collisions in corridors.
The four from the captain’s table and the two of us did the Martinique excursion together, along with a couple of dozen other passengers. This excursion was terrific.
A bus hauled everybody past fishing villages — and we actually stopped at a couple and were able to poke around — then to the town of St-Pierre. Before 1902, St-Pierre was the capital of Martinique. On May 8 of that year, Mt. Pelee did a Mt. St. Helens. The explosion just about leveled the place, killing 30,000 people.
There was one survivor: a prisoner named Cyparis, who was saved because his cell (still there) held up against the blast. He’d been jailed for drunkenness. This tour celebrated that fact by taking us next to a rum distillery. That was followed by a drive-through rain forest that made the greenery along Maui’s celebrated Hana Road look like a dust bowl.
Dinner. The headwaiter brought a birthday cake to the table in honor of one of the couple’s anniversary, and we were serenaded. It wasn’t their anniversary. We lied.
None of the six of us from the rum sampling made it to the evening show.
Day 6: Antigua
There reportedly are 365 beaches on Antigua. We took a cab to one of them. Cost us $24 if you count the $10 round-trip taxi, the rental beach chairs, the bottle of water and the beer.
The ship’s “Beach Break” excursion would have cost us $96, including lunch and two beverages.
We ate later, in town. I had the Creole fish with fungi, a locally popular glop of cornmeal and other stuff, plus salad. Excellent. $7.
Shopped a little. Bought nothing.
Back to the ship. Poolside. Sun. Another beer for me, a virgin pina colada for The Wife. A little reading. More sun, followed by pre-dinner cocktails in that penthouse, courtesy of Raymond and Ellen.
And yet another good dinner. Second formal night. My rented cummerbund, which may again have been upside down, kept creeping toward my knees. The other couple — not the ones who were serenaded the night before on their non-anniversary — treated the table to champagne in honor of their own non-occasion. We forgot to order the cake.
This evening’s show was called “Cirque du Galaxy.” Fine show. Our Chinese Acrobats were back, though their performance got off to a shaky start when the stack of hoops they were supposed to dive through collapsed.
As did we — too soon for midnight Le Grand Buffet and its ice sculptures.
We also missed formal night karaoke, which was just as well, since by then the rented cummerbund would’ve been around my knees.
Imagine that conga.
Day 7: St. Thomas
There are wonderful things to do in St. Thomas. Some people from cruise ships actually experience them. The other 95 percent shop.
St. Thomas is considered by those who know this stuff to be a shopper’s paradise. We can’t tell a Lladro from a Rolex, and it doesn’t matter: The touts on Main Street in Charlotte Amalie want you. From “T-shirts, four for $10” to the universal call of the time-share hustler (“Hi, folks — where you from?”), Charlotte Amalie has ’em all. Almost all are refugees from places like Long Island and Ohio.
Bonnie Lindberg, working to lure cruise people into a jewelry store, fled to St. Thomas from Marquette, Mich., years ago.
“I love it down here,” she said. The one frustration: “Sometimes you get tourists who aren’t very receptive,” she said. “And they always seem to come off the same boat.”
We ducked into a different jewelry store. In a corner of the shop we saw Patty, the decorator. Steps away was Al, from Buffalo. He had a look I recognized.
“Being a good boy?” I said to Al. “I already was,” said Al, signing the credit slip.
The Wife was chatting with Patty. Patty looked very pleased. A saleswoman from Seattle came by and offered me a beer. It turned out to be an expensive beer.
But minutes later, The Wife looked very pleased…
There was still half a day left. We considered the options. Beach. Nine holes at Mahogany Run. The ship.
The ship had a pool, soft chairs and guys paid to make sure you were never, ever thirsty. The ship had friends who made us laugh, and they found us.
Power-walking toward us was the Yankee fan from Boston, who was doing laps. He smiled and waved as he went by. The Canadian women, husbands elsewhere, came over to say hello. Other people whose names we didn’t know, but whose smiles we did, said hi.
At 6 — in what had become a nightly ritual — we all moved toward the rail. There’s something sweetly melancholy about a ship easing back to sea, at sunset, from an island where fun had been committed, and this was this cruise’s final sailaway. The people who had laughed with us and eaten illicit cake with us and had waved and said hi and been so much a part of this good time would scatter the next morning. Promises to keep in touch would fade with their winter tans.
The evening show was the Farewell Show. Our Chinese Acrobats did a farewell tumble. And then it was all over.
People had to pack. No buffet. No band. No bouncing.
But we finally had this cruise thing figured out. There will be a next time.
And next time, we conga!
———-
Alan Solomon’s e-mail address is alsolly@aol.com.
IF YOU GO
THE CRUISE
Seven-night cruises to the Southern Caribbean aboard Celebrity Cruises’ Galaxy, out of San Juan, include stops in St. Lucia, Barbados, Martinique, Antigua and St. Thomas; an alternate itinerary includes St. Croix in place of Martinique. November through April. Prices on either itinerary range from $1,795 to $7,125, per person, double occupancy; substantial discounts can be had on some sailings by booking early. Air fares not included; all prices and itineraries subject to change.
THE SHIP
Galaxy’s listed guest capacity is 1,870, with a crew of 900. Built in 1996, the ship’s amenities include two outdoor swimming pools, an indoor pool, a children’s pool and four whirlpools, plus a complete spa, including a well-equipped workout facility. Also, two restaurants, plus another cafe serving pizza and sandwiches, 12 bars and a movie theater, plus the usual showroom, casino (9,537 square feet) and disco. An indoor golf facility was out of order on our cruise, but a top-deck outdoor basketball court and table-tennis table worked fine.
EXTRAS
Shore excursions: a wide range, from snorkeling in St. Thomas and elsewhere (from $28) to two-tank dives, various locales ($90). Also, kayak adventures, island tours, flightseeing, distillery tours, party boats, submarine dives and more. Most have reduced rates for children. Representative prices for spa services: manicures, $25-$40; facials, $50-$99; massages: $65 (half-body) to $190 (reflexology and full-body massage); eyelash tinting, $25.
ACCESSIBILITY
One inside and seven outside staterooms are specifically outfitted for passengers requiring wheelchairs. Some decks (but not all) have barriers that make them unsuitable for wheelchairs.
INFORMATION
Call Celebrity at 800-CELEBRITY; www.celebritycruises.com or call your travel agent.
