July 27, 2006

TIMESTRAVELS

TravelTalk
By Mike Cleary

After a rocky start, we became addicted to cruisin’

Mary Ann and I will host our 15th cruise with All Cruise Travel (allcruise.com) and Crystal Cruises (crystalcruises.com) in late September.

It’s a well-priced, seven-day sailing on the Crystal Symphony from New York. Our pleasurable jaunt will take us to Halifax, Nova Scotia with stops on the way back to New York in Bar Harbor, Boston and Newport. Come along if you can. We always have a great group on these excursions.

Obviously, we love being on ships. The irony, though, is we resisted cruising for the longest time. Perhaps, it was our previous experiences.

What not to do
My first was a repositioning cruise. The ship sailed from the Brooklyn Army Terminal to Bremerhaven, Germany. No stateroom on this cruise. I was directed to the bottom aft hold where 50 of us slept in tiered hammocks. It was the dead of winter and it took seven hundred days to cross the stormy Atlantic. At least, that’s what I told the kids. I had such a marvelous time; I abandoned any thought of ever taking a cruise again.

Two decades later, thanks to a radio promotion, Mary Ann and I sailed out of Los Angeles on a three-day Mexico "fun" cruise with a group of listeners. While waiting to board we heard a young man boast that he was getting drunk as soon as he boarded and would remain in that pickled condition for the duration. Little did we know he spoke for many of his fellow passengers on the SS Margarita, as we came to call it. Figuring we could never top that boozy cruise, we swore off traveling by anything that floats.

Then one day in the late 90s, I was remarking on my radio show about the film "Out to Sea" with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, a comedy about two men with four left feet and questionable charm who become dance hosts on a cruise ship. I asked if there was anyone listening who was the real thing. Joe Reis of San Francisco called in, saying he’d been all over the world as an Ambassador Host for Crystal Cruises.

Traveling in style
When Joe asked about our experiences at sea, I said we had never cruised in the obvious style to which he was accustomed. Deciding we needed to sail on one of the Crystal Cruises’ ships, Joe put us in touch with Crystal’s offices and, before you could say "Ship Ahoy," we were lecturers for a repositioning cruise on the Harmony sailing from Acapulco to San Francisco.

Thanks to Crystal Cruises, our conversion to modern day, luxury seafarers was immediate. There were myriad reasons why this cruise was so seducing, but it was the service that completely won us over. We had never experienced anything quite like it in any of our travels. If Uncle Sam had shipped me to Germany on the Harmony, I’d be the Army’s oldest private.

After that cruise, we knew two things. We would definitely include cruises in our future travel plans and Crystal would be our line of choice. We figured our next cruise would be two or three years out. As it turned out, though, we didn’t have to wait that long.

One afternoon, a sales executive for our radio station brought Bill Knight, owner of All Cruise Travel, into the studio to meet me. Bill wanted to know if Mary Ann and I would be interested in hosting a group of listeners on a 12-day Alaskan cruise sailing round-trip from San Francisco. You can imagine my delight in learning that the ship was the Harmony, the very vessel that just two weeks prior we disembarked, kicking and screaming the whole way.

So we became hosts and in the next few years took groups of varying numbers to Alaska, Mexico, the East Coast, Panama Canal and the Mediterranean. We made many friends over the years that often join us for other cruises.

Mary Ann said it best, “Whether you’ve never cruised or have a hundred under your life vest, the joy of a hosted cruise is you automatically have a society on board the ship.” And from a host’s point of view, with Crystal’s onboard activities, exciting ports of call and great dining backing you up, how can you go wrong?
Cheers.