Cruise ships are like people. They come in all shapes and sizes and have different characters from the small to the massive. The Royal Caribbean ship we went on was like a floating village with over 5000 passengers and hundreds of staff
It was like transporting our home village of Hethersett into a ship and sailing them away. Of course, new development has added considerably to Hethersett's population which would no longer fit onto one ship.
On our latest trip, we shared a table at one point with Lindsay and his wife Vera from Darwin up in the Northern Territory of Australia. They asked us what our favourite cruise has been and that's a difficult question. Some tours are better than others, some places visited are better than others. Sometimes familiarity can breed contempt and some ships are better than others.
What you usually get is top notch food and very good entertainment. Take our latest cruise on the Queen Elizabeth. The entertainment on the first two evenings was excellent. The first was a high energy duo called Strings Alive.
The second was a female singer called Annie Francis. An Australian, she did number one hits from the 1970s. Now anyone who knows me will know I love the music of the sixties and the seventies. I am particularly interested in the way 1950s music transformed into the pop/rock music of the 1960s. How it went from soppy ballads to aggressive rock. That doesn't mean to say that I don't like those soppy ballads of the fifties, but I'm intrigued how a simple girl loves boy or boy loves girl scenario morphed into wonderful at times politically motivated music. I'm sure this is a subject I will return to in a future blog. But back to cruising.
Some people I know will say "I couldn't go on a cruise." Firstly, they think they will be seasick. Then they think there will be a claustrophobic press of people. Neither is remotely true.
It's one of those things you need to experience if you can before making up your mind with the facts rather than with prejudice
I particularly remember the slow pace of life on board. That and the wall to wall entertainment. There's always something to do or you can just veg out. We tend to fit in as much as we can. I can never really remember sitting around reading a book. There are always games to play, talks to attend, people to chat to etc etc.