Blue Planet Journey

  People cruise (or choose to avoid cruses) for a variety of reasons. Caroline started cruising a lot because she started working on the ships! In 2018, before she retired due to the impacts of Covid-19 on the industry, she wrote  about her experience for a local newspaper: In 2017, I had the opportunity to check off a bucket list item by living and working on a luxury cruise liner for 14 weeks. This experience was thrilling, amazing and inspiring. In late July, I boarded the Celebrity Eclipse , a 2,800-passenger vessel sailing out of Southampton, England. I took care of dialysis patients, people who had lost kidney function and needed a machine to clean their blood and take off excess fluid. Dialysis at Sea, a company based in Florida, provided the equipment allowing dialysis patients to travel the world just like everyone else. I sailed on seven separate cruises, with itineraries that included Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Can...

  A "veggie burger" in the Windjammer buffet.  If I wanted mashed potatoes, I'd choose mashed potatoes. After spending a month on the Anthem of the Seas , I was looking forward to a trip on a different ship. And this trip was going to include the entire family, some of whom had never cruised before, so I was looking forward to them being impressed with a week on the Voyager of the Seas. Voyager is a smaller ship than Anthem , so I knew in advance there were some missing amenities. Still, they were all part of the Royal Caribbean corporate ecosystem, so the overlapping elements, like the quality of the food and service or the accuracy of the "Cruise Compass" (a digital or paper calendar detailing everything there is to see and do onboard, from dining times to the location of trivia contests to where all the many musicians are playing) should be similar. It wasn't. The week we returned home, we canceled our future transatlantic cruise on the  Voyager. We neve...