Come Sail Away

My British ladyfriend Therisa once worked for the Carnival cruise line in the 1990s before she arrived in New York City, and she called her stint as a ship entertainer a "fun life." Wonder what she thinks about the Carnival Triumph in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Triumph, of course, had an engine fire last week while at sea (or at gulf) and was adrift with no electricity and no running water, turning the ship into a giant lifeboat. Despite Carnival's efforts at trying to reimburse passengers for their trouble, it's lost customers it can never get back and other cruise lines can never hope to acquire. Many of these people never want to go out on a cruise again.

Cruises are dumb, anyway. What are they but overstuffed boat rides? You get on board an ocean liner, you toodle around one of the coasts of Mexico or a group of islands, you stop at ports of call for souvenir shopping, and you do nothing but eat and watch shows while at sea. These cruise ships are nothing but floating resorts. Apart from Cunard's Queen Mary 2, there are no ocean liners that actually take you from one place to another, where you board a ship in New York, you sail to Southampton, you get off, then you spend some time in Europe before going home. Or how about when people took a ship the other way and landed in New York to immigrate here through Ellis Island? Ships aren't for traveling anymore. They're not meant to get to a destination. They are a destination. Blame the airlines for that, since airliners can get you across the ocean in as many hours as the number of days it takes to cross the ocean by ship. Add to that the fact that Americans have little vacation time - two weeks. You try taking the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic so you can see the Old Country. As soon as you dock, it's time to go home. If not for cruise ships, there wouldn't be much of an ocean liner business left.

The cruise trade has been hit so hard by accidents - don't forget the listing ship off the coast of Italy - that I can't imagine the appeal of riding around on a big ship for no apparent reason lasting. We should save ocean liners for people who want to travel abroad but don't want to fly - thanks to airline deregulation, I'm sure there are plenty of those - and leave cruising to the Circle Line boats around Manhattan or boat rides on abandoned canals. Given our dwindling energy supplies, we probably won't be able to rely so much on jet airliners in the future anyway.

(Pointless aside I couldn't resist: Writer Chuck Klostermann once wrote a funny essay involving this very same Carnival ship, when the Triumph hosted corporate rock bands Journey, Styx and REO Speedwagon on a concert cruise. To think having so much rock and roll mediocrity on one ship was the worst thing to happen to the Triumph [which Klostermann regretted did not include the Canadian power trio of the same name] before now.)