Oh, we know what you're thinking—cruises are for retired cardiologists and their wives, who want to spend a week in deck chairs reading Robert Ludlum. Well, we're just back from two cruises, and we're here to tell you that the face of cruising has changed.
Since we honeymooned on the QE2, cruising has gotten bigger: it's currently the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. And it's gotten younger: 1 million of the 8 million passengers who set sail in 2003 were under 19.
Travel + Leisure Family sent us and our kids, Gabriel, 13, and Charlie, 9, onto the high seas to find out why. Our mission: to test and compare Disney Cruise Line, which revolutionized the idea of the floating family vacation, and Royal Caribbean, which, just as its enormous ships hog the water, occupies a whopping 30 percent of the U.S. cruising market.
Some of our more condescending friends were, well, condescending when we announced our intentions, snidely telling us we'd be shouting "Bingo!" in our sleep for years to come. But we imagined our kids whooshing down a massive spiral slide into an onboard swimming pool or doing the macarena at a dessert bar on Deck 12, and we were not to be dissuaded.
THE DISNEY FACTOR If you sport a tattoo of Tigger on your ankle, or even Mickey dressed as a ninja on your biceps, as more than a few fellow passengers on our first weeklong cruise did, then chances are you feel there's no such thing as too much Disney. We respectfully disagree. Okay, maybe not so respectfully. Over the years we've come to distrust that voice loop in all parents' heads, implanted there from years of pop-culture indoctrination, telling us: Must...choose...Disney.
Still, Disney being Disney, it's the one cruise line that bills itself not just as fun for the whole family, but as fun only for the whole family. High rollers, for instance, need not board; there's no casino here. But as Disney has demonstrated over the decades, the trick to creating family entertainment isn't to remove the "adult" content. It's to figure out how to amuse the kids while placating the parents, who not only pay the way but are, in this case literally, along for the ride.
THE PARENT TRAP As we stepped onto the Disney Magic on a bright summer afternoon, a "cast member" looked at our tickets and proclaimed into a microphone, "The Panek-Wolitzer family from New York City has boarded the Magic," at which point her fellow cast members, arrayed at various levels around the soaring atrium, burst into applause. "That was so cool," Gabriel said, and we smiled at him, but inwardly we were wincing. This, we thought, was going to be a long, long week.
And at times during our stay the Disney sensibility was indeed inescapable. "Oh, boy, are we glad you're here!" squealed Mickey Mouse over the phone during our requested morning wake-up call. We also got to hear, whenever the ship blasted its signal, "When You Wish Upon a Star," foghorn-style. But our fear of being accosted by rogue Disney characters roaming the hallways turned out to be unfounded. In fact, the ship's printed itinerary, pored over by our kids as though it were Harry Potter Six: The Prisoner of Dizneyban, listed not only all the chances to "be a Mouseketeer," take an aerobics class, have a discount port-day facial, or play bingo (so our condescending friends were right!), but also where and when to meet Disney characters. Or not.
Our week aboard the Magic wasn't like being trapped within the shoulder restraints of a big Disney World ride; it was more like being coddled inside a nice, if outsized, hotel—one with a definite theme, but also with a kind of genteel, cream-colored, reassuringly generic feel. (The same is no doubt true of the Disney Wonder, the Magic's almost identical sister ship, which tours the Bahamas on three- and four-night journeys.) Even though we boarded with a steamer trunk full of irony, we soon found ourselves if not exactly worshipful, then at least often appreciative of the trademark Disney hyper-attention to detail, beginning with the clipboard-wielding Disney greeter who met our plane at the Orlando airport and directed us to the Disney shuttle bus that deposited us curbside at the Disney terminal in nearby Port Disney (er, Port Canaveral), and ending exactly one week later with a disembarkation procedure that emptied the 2,600-passenger ship in one hour flat. As a result, we wound up doing the one thing you want to do more than anything else at a resort: sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying the show.
BE THEIR GUEST And what a show it is. While a great number of Disney Magic's entertainment offerings are targeted at kids, many of them appealed to us as well—original stage shows with chorus lines, movable sets, and even heart-grabbing fireworks, as well as first-run Disney movies and a roster of magicians and comedians who reminded us of performers on The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson was the host. (That's a compliment!) And the week we were on the Magic, a fine imitation Beatles band was the headliner for a sixties night, exemplifying Disney's effort to keep a new generation of parents happily nostalgic.
But we also couldn't help noticing that the Magic after dark took on a sedate rather than sexy feel. Though it's true that the well-conceived kids' programs, Oceaneer's Club (ages 3-7) and Oceaneer's Lab (ages 8-12), stay open into the evening so that parents can have time to themselves, we saw plenty of adults wandering the corridors at night with yawning children attached to their legs like vines. Some families were just beat, and the prospect of a cushy stateroom often seemed more attractive than partying into the night. (We had a suite, a bit snug but inviting, with sliding glass doors to separate the rooms, double sinks in one of the two bathrooms, and upper-crust hotel furnishings.)
An adults-only entertainment sector was off-limits to children after 9 p.m.—a nice idea in theory, but on the occasions when we ventured there, the cocktail lounge had all of eight guests by 11:30, and the adjacent dance floor emptied promptly at midnight, as if Cinderella's coach were waiting. Like the formula bottle next to the beer bottle we spied one night on a table in a bar called the ESPN Skybox (since replaced by a teen lounge), the truce between Disney and adulthood is not entirely an easy one.
LEAVING NEVERLAND Even before we boarded Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas, we could tell we weren't in Disney's embrace anymore. This time, we had to find our own way to a terminal in Miami, and the signs there turned out to be ambiguous enough that our taxi had to circle the port twice before locating the right drop-off point (we could see the Navigator, we just couldn't get to it), and then we had to negotiate with the curbside porter over an appropriate tip for wheeling our luggage inside on a cart (apparently $9 was too little), and then—the ultimate ignominy!—no cast members waited at the gangplank leading onto the ship to applaud our arrival.
All right, maybe we'd been spoiled by Disney. Maybe we were even getting a little cruised-out. The truth is, what Disney does best is cocoon you inside its fantasy world, whereas what other large cruise lines do is immerse you in your own world, only more so. Aboard the Navigator of the Seas, the pace was fast, the music was loud, and the place never shut down.
ENTERING HERE-AND-NOW LAND The Navigator of the Seas was, at the time of our sailing, the world's largest cruise ship. (The Queen Mary 2 currently has that honor, although Royal Caribbean has an even bigger ship in the works.) The ship's literature boasts of an impressive collection of art, and some of the huge über-modern sculptures resemble works you might see in an enlightened industrial park in, say, Scandinavia—the birthplace of the Navigator, as it so happens. A 13-story atrium elicited oohs and aahs from our fellow passengers as they pressed against the glass walls of the elevators. Several times we encountered one of the ship's highest-ranking officers in the elevators, and each time he said, "This ship big enough for you?" The question should have been, "Is this ship too big for you?" The Navigator has anything and everything that a cruise ship can offer. Hell, it has much of what a midsized city can offer, minus a symphony. (Do a steel-drum band and a few jazz trios, rock bands, and crooners count?)
The centerpiece of the ship is the Royal Promenade, a deck composed mostly of stores of the Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A., variety. Perfume & Cosmetics was the name of one shop, Logo Souvenir another. Ceilings soared, fountains roared, and all at once we knew what the place resembled most: not a street but a mall. We came all the way here to walk around a mall?
We instinctively gripped our kids' hands a little tighter. And they just as instinctively wanted to let go of our hands and wander off. It didn't help that we had to endure glitches and foul-ups of the kind that only Disney seems able to prevent (perhaps owing to a one-mistake-and-you-walk-the-plank attitude toward its employees?). The trouble started when we entered the dining room and were told we'd have to join a table for 12.
"Eat with strangers?" said Charlie, voicing the horror we all felt. "No way!"
The concierge was decidedly unhelpful, but in the end it all worked out and we got a place to ourselves. (You, too, can perform the minor miracle of nabbing your own table by showing up at the concierge's station as soon as possible; a little rejiggering of seating assignments is usually possible.) Our stateroom, while large and bright and modern, had, on the first day, a distinct smell of smoke. The cabin attendant citrus-sprayed it away immediately, but it still reminded us: Oh, yeah, people smoke on this ship (though supposedly only in smoking areas and on open-air decks).
Passengers not only smoke, they drink and—gasp—they gamble. Boy, do they gamble. The casino, one of the world's largest at sea, was almost always open and active. Because it was off-limits to our kids, they were inevitably drawn to it. Each time they passed by the darkish room with the clanging coins, flashing lights, and mesmerizing voice repeating "Yes, Master" on the I Dream of Jeannie slot machine, Charlie and Gabriel had to peer in. For here was the heart and soul of the Navigator of the Seas, and they knew it.
The sanitized small world in which we'd been living the previous week had truly and completely given way to something else. But we had surrendered then, and so, in all fairness, we had to surrender now. The time had come to loosen our grip on our children's hands. We sent our sons off to their age-appropriate day programs, and then the strangest thing happened: We all had a wonderful time.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON, AND ON, AND ON Welcome to the Land of the Midnight Putt (24-hour miniature golf), to say nothing of the 2 a.m. swim (24-hour pools) and the 4 a.m. nightcap (in the Dungeon, a dance club where, at least on the one night we lasted until final call, the dancing did get dirty). Theater showtimes are at 8:30 and 10:45, instead of Disney's 6:30 and 8:30. We counted nine bars that stay open until 1 a.m. Correspondingly, the kids' programs also go on until a whopping 1 a.m., and the hangout for kids ages 12 to 17, Adventure Ocean Back Deck, is open 24 hours (!!!). Our children were hyped-up and happy. They darted about, made friends, descended upon the arcade, signed their own chits for soft drinks, and enjoyed the Navigator's programs, in truth, more than they had Disney's. They were able to ice-skate on the ship's indoor rink and scale the world's highest at-sea climbing wall, not to mention eat endless free soft ice cream cones from the self-serve machine on Main Street. For them—as for many of our fellow passengers, child and adult alike—too much was never enough.
This was excess. This was hedonism. This was...a vacation.
We were beginning to reach a realization: all cruises that cater to families possess some degree of that ineffable "tacky" factor that today's ocean liners are famous for. When an institution handles thousands of people at a time, it's aiming for the common denominator. Clearly, Americans like to eat, drink, climb walls, gamble, and then eat some more. Satisfying all these desires is Royal Caribbean's top priority.
And a place that satisfies desires can start to feel awfully comforting, even if it is visually and aurally overwhelming. This insight struck us abruptly at the end of a long day as we trudged back to the dock at whatever port of call it was—after a while every "exotic" location starts to look alike—and our ship first came into sight.
Our ship. Our ship. Our Navigator of the Seas.
ALL ASHORE Yes, when you take a family cruise, all subtlety goes out the porthole. These cruises are the opposite of looking at art and cathedrals in Europe; they are also the opposite of a rental in the Berkshires. You will definitely gain weight, no matter what you do, and you will definitely be encouraged to purchase photographs of yourselves along the way, so that you can see the weight gain in progress, like one of those time-lapse films of the growth and blossoming of a flower.
But family cruises are actually a lot of fun, as well—at least, these two were—as long as you can find a balance between your own aesthetics and your desire to give your kids a memorable vacation. Charlie and Gabriel still talk about the pleasure of having milk shakes and fries by themselves late at night in a booth at Johnny Rockets, the retro malt shop on the Navigator, and they also both talk about the witty magician on the Magic who pulled glowing red lights out of their ears.
So what's our advice to you? Parents with kids up to age 11 or 12 should consider Disney; it's more low-key than Royal Caribbean, and your children will be thrilled. Families with preteens and teens ought to consider the Royal Caribbean route, because of its decidedly edgier feel. And, if you ask us, a week at sea is just right—the only "characters" we want to be around any longer than that are, of course, the ones in our own family.
RICHARD PANEK is the author of The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes (Viking). MEG WOLITZER's most recent novel is The Wife (Scribner).
