April and I traipsed across the gangplank at our assigned time, leaving sovereign

US soil and joining 4000 other landlubbers for 8 days on a seaborn odyssey
destined to carry us a thousand calorie-laden nautical miles from home.
Presumably, our forebears bravely boarded smaller, much less accommodating
vessels to find their way to the wild lands of the New World in pursuit of
opportunities unavailable in their places of origin. Their sacrifices and lives filled
with labor and struggle have somehow led to a bizarre reality whereby we can
drink $15 mai tais in our bathing suits while waiting in line to slide down a
serpentine water slide perched on top of a giant boat as it chugs toward Puerto
Rico. I actually don't know if it chugs, although I saw a lot of fellow passengers do
their fair share, but it sure did belch a lot of smoke as we maintained our 20-knot
pace all the way to the Caribbean.

Our steward was George, an irrepressibly sweet man from Indonesia who greeted
us upon our arrival so warmly and made it clear that his existence on the boat
was entirely devoted to our happiness for the duration. We learned that he had
24 other cabins, but he was surely convincing in his commitment to our joy. We
also came to find out that he has a wife and four children at home whom he will
not see until December based on his current contract. He is 18 years into this
lifestyle and swore that he has no regrets. From the ludicrously identifiable
animals he formed from our towels daily (the monkey even had pursed lips) to
the effervescence he offered whenever we passed him through his astute medical
advice for April's seasickness (green apples, who knew?), the man is a gem. Born
into different circumstances, I could imagine him as a world-class doctor with a
warmth of bedside manner rarely found or perhaps as the captain of the ship.

Food was an omnipresent experience throughout. It seemed that everyone we

met was either headed to a dining room, eating, recovering from a meal, or
planning their next reservation, throughout. On your way to the dining room,
there is a buffet which never closes. There is a bar or a restaurant taking up
virtually every square foot not already devoted to cabins, hot tubs, water slides,
stages, or dance floors. A man who appeared to have eaten the last person to
suggest that he might be suffering from an entitlement complex openly
complained that the buffet had the same food every morning for breakfast. It
took all my self-control not to point out that the food is identical because the
spread contains every edible concept known to humankind already. I will be
fasting for the next week in an effort to see my toes again after wallowing in
shrimp scampi, prime rib, and Baked Alaska for most of my waking hours.

There is an onboard casino which opens the moment the ship sets sail and never
stops blinging, smoking, and printing profits for the entirety of the water-bound
time. It was a quick shortcut through all those neon lights to a variety of
restaurants, so I wandered through with regularity, marveling at the folks who
were able to navigate their drink, their cigarette, and the ceaseless button
pushing amid all the flashy whiz-bang effects designed to inspire dopamine
bursts and intermittent positive reinforcement. I guarantee that there were
people who spent more on slot machines than they did on the cruise. I lost 50
bucks at BlackJack in about 15 minutes and concluded that there were better
places to overspend while entertaining myself. My dealer hailed from a country
where my gambling losses would represent a month's income for a family, which
was a feeling that tasted worse than the cigar being smoked beside me by a
cowboy hat-wearing insurance salesman from Indiana.

We arrived in San Juan none too soon because the drawstring on my swim trunks
was starting to fray from overexertion. April, being a Spanish teacher and a
committed planner, had a vision for our 5 hours on land and we covered 5 miles
in that town by foot. It's an ancient port, but the daily presence of cruise ships
has likely eroded much of the old-world charm. It's a grand modern irony that we
seek out rare beauty, unique experiences, and authentic opportunities, only to
erase the original charm by way of our incessant presence. T-shirt shops
abounded for tourists to buy attire emblazoned with Puerto Rican icons made in
China. I asked a shopkeeper if he identified more strongly as an American or a
Puerto Rican and he said, "The Bronx. That's really who I am. That's where I
learned my culture."

The next day found us in the Dominican Republic and we purchased an excursion
which purported to offer us a truck tour of Puerto Plata and the outskirts. I don't
think that anyone on that massive open air bus really had any idea what we were
getting into, but it became, by a massive margin, the most memorable
component of the entire trip. Extricating ourselves from the port is more difficult
than it sounds because of the substantial security measures designed to ensure
that Amber Cover remains a place where sunburned tourists can leave their
buffets and pools on the boat in order to languish by the pool at a bar and order
shrimp cocktails. We pulled out on a major highway populated by as many
motorcycles as cars. There were only two lanes but most drivers utilized the
narrow shoulders as a third and sometimes fourth lane. If, say, a banana cart
being pulled by a mo-ped overturned, no one would slow down whatsoever: they
would just start swerving around the obstacle with nary a turn signal or a foot
remotely caressing a brake. It was by turns invigorating and scary as hell.

I was seated in the back of the bus as we climbed a curvaceous mountain pass.
There was a double line, but that resonated as much as the sign on the ship that
said "Take all you want, but eat all you take.". Most of the curves were blind, but
the motorcycles passing us didn't care because they fully expected oncoming
traffic to avoid them on the shoulder. When a late model Japanese sedan with
heavily tinted windows began tailgating us, I knew what was coming. A hand
reached out from the back seat and gave me the peace sign. Ah, cultural
engagement, I thought, as I returned the apparently universal gesture. Then the
hand signaled thumbs up or thumbs down? They wanted my input on whether or
not they should pass the bus...on a curve that included a rock wall on one side
and a steep cliff on the other. April immediately told me not to get involved and
changed seats to recuse herself from the process. I was too busy vigorously
shaking my head at my new friends to keep them from committing harakiri as an
18-wheeler was plummeting down the mountain in the other lane. The car was
spending most of its time in the middle of the road anyway, so I was rather
convinced that they were going whether I was helping or not, so I made a show
of swinging my head back and forth, tennis fan style, to demonstrate that I was
REALLY trying to find them an opening. When I was able to see about 50 yards
(they use meters there, but for the purposes of my estimate, I'm an American) I
shooed them on. They rolled down their darkened windows as they blew past the
bus revealing a car filled with teenagers laughing, smiling, smoking, drinking, and
waving at me. The motorcycle that spontaneously appeared in the other lane
slickly swerved onto the shoulder at the last second with nary a honk, thankfully
allowing me to avoid whatever passes for accessory to murder on Hispaniola.

We drove through town where electrical wires dangled seemingly everywhere

and we scraped more than a few of them. People waved and smiled wherever we
went, despite living in the kind of squalor that most Americans cannot conceive.
So many buildings were either incomplete, half destroyed, or essentially open-air
shanties. Trash abounded, piled in bags, floating on the wind, strewn on every
sidewalk and crammed in the gutters. We even passed what appeared to be a
landfill, but it was really just a gargantuan mountain of trash such that a garbage
avalanche might be forthcoming at any moment. Fences abutted any remotely
nice building and they often had broken glass mortared into the tops to keep out
intruders. As we drove parallel to the beach, there were tiki bars, often patronized
by Americans in flip flops, kite surfing lessons, brand new cabanas, and sparkingly
white sand. Just a few blocks from the water, we saw dogs with every rib visible,
barefoot children who begged for candy, and abandoned cars with every
instrument of value stripped from them.

Outside of town, we climbed another mountain, this one by virtue of a single-

lane gravel road that rambled between two farmers' fences which were stapled to
the palm trees which, to this southern boy's eyes, were like cedars, the prolific
cacti were reminiscent of kudzu, and mangos are as common as our acorns.
Iguanas squirreled around, a farmer showed us his pet tarantula, and we got to
see the tree that produces the gourd that is used to make maracas: they looked
like duckpin bowling balls among the branches. We pulled up to a modest
farmhouse on the edge of the road and were welcomed by its inhabitants. A
strikingly handsome young man fed a calf with a bottle while his mother chopped
mangos, papayas, limoncillo (she had to teach me how to bite it in half and spit
the skin out), and pitaya (it was incomprehensibly sweet until I saw that she was
adding sugar by the spoonful). We explored their house, Colonial Williamsburg
style, as they showed us how they use their primitive clay oven to cook and I
marveled at the fact that most of the rooms had walls which did not reach the
ceiling. Digging into my 10th grade Spanish, I asked, "Lluvia?" The tia who was
showing us around said that it only rains poca, in diciembre and enero.
Fascinatingly, two very sweet children sat on a sofa watching a giant screen TV
equipped with Youtube. We were told that the mountain was wired for the
internet during COVID so that the kids could continue their educations. April,
whose Spanish constantly elicited praise and surprise that a gringa was so fluent
asked the children about their lives. The little girl said that she dreams of being a
doctor while her brother just asked that she take his offer of friendship back to
her students in America.

Back on the bus, our delightful tour guide pulled out a bottle of rum, passed out
plastic cups, and didn't ID anyone before pouring healthy drams for all. As we
flew down the mountain, April and I couldn't stop giggling as we tried to drink
the fermented sugar cane before the wind blew it away or one of the many pot
holes bounced it out of our cups. I remain shocked that the cruise line can handle
the association with such a raw and, dare I say, authentic glimpse of life on the
island while avoiding liability. Twenty-five years ago, I took another cruise ship
excursion on another tropical island which included riding in the back of an aged
hatchback passing a bottle back and forth with an islander as we sought out a
beach party, but I had no idea that such concepts would still exist in the age of
litigiousness. I'm so glad that they do.

Our final port of call was Grand Turk, which had, in addition to more boilerplate
tropical t-shirt shops, a Margaritaville which was playing electronica when the PA
system wasn't blasting "Shot, shot, shot shot". Apparently, someone complied a
bit too much as the pool had to be vacated due to vomit. I signed up for a
snorkeling trip which included a beach party. My catamaran captain made it clear
from the beginning that the snorkeling was a mere brief distraction from the rum
and coke, rum and sprite, rum and punch, and rum and rum that was coming. I
dove into the water as quickly as possible out of fear that my sub-surface
sightseeing would be greatly abbreviated in service to the hangovers that most
of my fellow cruisers were obviously nursing. I followed the dreadlocked first
mate, flipping my flippers as fast as I could to keep up with him, in the belief that
he would know where the fish were. It turns out that the fish knew where he was
because he was baiting them. The parallels between those fish swarming to be
fed and the thousands of vacationers pulling up to the trough three to five times
a day on the boat were too obvious to ignore. I did get to see the ocean floor
drop off from 35 feet into oblivion as the shelf, I'm told, drops to 7000 feet. The
first mate dropped his goggles right on the edge and after some British-accented
swearing, he dove all the way down to the edge of my vision and retrieved them.
I asked him how he could handle that depth and he said, "No worries, mon, I
burst my ear drum a long time ago and it gave me superpowers." Indeed.

The beach party was, predictably, a drunk fest because the drinks were unlimited
and very stiff. It was interrupted, though, when a squall came out of nowhere. The
rain may have watered down the copious rum runners a little, but it didn't
dampen the party on the beach one iota. The captain, who had been a pure
promotor of all manner of debauchery up to this point, got a look in his eye
which made me think that this was not his normal afternoon tropical shower. He
made a quick announcement about drinking more rum on the boat and ensured
that all those inebriated souls stumbled back on before he put on a master class
in maritime wrangling. The first mate had to pull one kid off the side to keep him
from doing a flip into the water as we pulled away. The water got rough and the
rain was coming in sideways when I realized that I could no longer see the cruise
ship which had, up to that point, been an everpresent backdrop on the near
horizon. After he deposited us safely back at the port where I could still hear
Margaritaville blasting through the deluge, I asked the captain how serious it had
been. He got serious again, looked me in the eye, and said, "I need to do this
until I retire and if some stupid American gets killed, I will lose my job." I thanked
him for keeping us all alive and asked him when he planned to retire. "As soon as
possible, Mon, so long as my luck holds out."

It took two days to chug (uh, motor?) back to Norfolk. I kept hearing mutterings
on the elevator about how people couldn't wait to get back home. One lady told
me that she was tired of drinking and missed her Netflix. We passed through rain
with some regularity, so some of the normal pool and hot tub routines were
eschewed in favor of more eating. The consumption seemed to ramp up as
people realized that their meal ticket would be ending upon our return to the
mainland. George remained a reliably smiling face, throughout, and we wrote him
a note with what I hope was a generous tip telling him that his spirit and kindness
were among the best parts of our experience.

The grumbling from the passengers continued until well after most folks had
braved the gangplanks one more time in search of an Uber to take them to their
next mode of transportation. Our Uber driver, for her part, said that she had been
hustling people from the port all morning long and she was getting tired of the
incessant messages seemingly offering more money every time I saw the alert
come up on her phone. The free market/gig economy is an ever-mutating
organism.

There are clearly cruisers and non-cruisers in this life. My "sail and sign" card (the
key to everything on board, especially the food) erroneously identified me as a
cruise virgin, but other folks had bling from literally dozens of previous ship
adventures, making it their annual family vacation event year after year. It was
fun, but I'm going to have to figure out a way to take the excursions while
avoiding the cruise itself. The ports, despite being enormously influenced by the
gargantuan boats which come and go on the daily, still have a soul and a story to
tell. The cruise itself is not much of a story beyond excess, the stark differences
between those who pay to be there and those who are paid to be there, and the
endless pursuit of more. More money, more lights, more passengers, bigger
decks, more elaborate packages, higher water slides, and rum and more rum.

While I am fasting, I will spend some time meditating on how that vacation time
might be invested next year. On land. And including adventures that are defined
by the earnest experience of them rather than the scores of other people trying
to have the identical "unique" experience. I do have a taste for rum now, though.