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| The Funky Chandelier Over the Epic’s Taste Dining Room |
A common question among cruise ship passengers is naturally, “How many cruises have you guys been on?” I guess the official answer is now three: in addition to our two recent Atlantic Ocean criss-crosses, we took the Norwegian Sun on a week-long Caribbean cruise from Houston for our 20th anniversary back in 2005. The two experiences–a 7-day out and back in the Mexican Riviera versus a transatlantic crossing–couldn’t have been more different.
Our week-long vacation on the Norwegian Sun almost a decade ago was what we’d consider a proper “cruise”. Our purpose was to get away to the sounds of steel drums, pull into some interesting ports of call, drink expensive umbrella drinks, and get sunburned. That’s what we were after, and NCL delivered it nicely. We were unplugged and off-the-clock.
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| Epic’s Pool Deck at Night |
Our crossings were so different from that experience, it’s hard to consider them cruises. In both the case of the Queen Mary 2 and the Norwegian Epic, the goal was to get from one side of the ocean to the other, not just tool around to the sound of steel drums. We’re starting to really love this more leisurely way of getting to and from Europe, and we’re not alone: we met at least a dozen other passengers who have crossed the oceans at surface level before. In that sense, it’s very possible to use cruise ships for transportation, not just cruising (we’ve thought of a couple of ways to use cruise ships this way, so keep an eye out for that blog).
Another principle difference in our cruise experience versus our crossings were, and this is 100% unique to us, that we worked as we went. Our Caribbean cruise on the Norwegian Sun way back when was to purposefully unplug from work; now that we travel all the time, we work a whole lot differently than most people. Granted, on the Queen Mary in December work was limited to staying in touch; work on the Norwegian Epic was more like real work. But as we love what we do, and especially where and when we do it, that suits us fine. Like I said before, we weren’t the only people working on either the Epic or the QM2.
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| Epic’s Adults-Only Quiet Deck |
In our blog a few days ago, we related to you that we were initially caught up in the futile exercise of comparing our Epic experience to our QM2 experience. Hopefully we went on to clarify that we really did have a splendid time on the Norwegian Epic, from the food and the shows to the hot tub and the sunning. But what we most enjoyed about our cruise on the Epic was, as is often the case, meeting fellow passengers and enjoying the art of conversation.
We met a wonderful couple who had spent most of the last couple of decades living and working on a boat in the Caribbean and were now on a quest to see the rest of the world; we would meet up with them again for dinner once we were in Barcelona. We met a couple from Canada who were off to Europe while their house was undergoing major renovations to correct a “little issue” with a leaky heating oil tank that had rendered their house uninhabitable (and reminding us it isn’t all that bad not to own a house). There was the couple from Ohio, with a vacation home in central Florida, who gave us a solid recommendation on a community once we’re ready to buy in the Disney area.
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| A Sunset – Or Maybe A Sunrise? – On The Epic |
There was the couple who had cruised to all seven continents and were now trying to tick off their list of countries, one by one. And there was the German immigrant who now lived in Colorado, who helped us contemplate what to call the incredible blue-ness of the mid-day Atlantic Ocean (you’ll recall we settled on “Space-Earth Blue”), and there was the former Scotsman now loving life in the Arizona desert, and the retired octogenarian who traveled alone because his wife didn’t like travel, and…many more.
Too many people, though, wear the number of cruises as some sort of badge. We’re not anti-bucket list, and we don’t have any problem with people traveling to cross things off a list: we admire the couple who had been to all 7 continents and were planning to “hit” every country they could. Another guy bragged to us at lunch one day that he’d been on “12 to 15” cruises. Hmm, seems at least three of those cruises were less than memorable. And as we related to the country-hitting couple that we’d spent a month in Valencia, Spain last year, we couldn’t help but notice the husband wistfully say, “I’d like to spend a month somewhere.”
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| Waiting for the Big Show to Start |
Indeed, we had a splendid time riding the Norwegian Epic to Barcelona. In fact, we will have another splendid time with NCL sometime in the future: we took advantage of their onboard offer and plunked down a deposit on a future cruise. Whether it’s as a cruise or a crossing, time will tell. And when, on that cruise, another passenger asks how many cruises we’ve been on before, we’re likely to just smile and say it’s our first.
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| The Coast of Africa As We Passed The Straits of Gibraltar |
