In cruising, my husband and I have reached a sort of compromise: I can venture to multiple countries, of varying degrees of comfort and safety, in a single trip, and he can sit in the bar while he is seamlessly transported to each of those countries. I can go to the gym and swim multiple times each day, and he can sit in the bar and await my return. I can embark on elaborately deep friendships with Americans I’ve never met before over endless bar trivia and karaoke and he can… well, you get the picture. He doesn’t have to worry about missed flights, lost luggage, or that his wife has inadvertently booked a hotel in the heart of the red light district again, and I still get to undertake copious planning as I research each location in unnecessary detail, which he can then ignore.
Our ship left Tampa over the Easter weekend and bobbed around the Caribbean for a bit before steaming up to New York over three “sea days”. While this sounds an illogical route, it enabled the ship to embark on a transatlantic cruise out of New York Harbour the day after we docked, ahead of it spending the summer in Europe. It also allowed it to provide luxury transportation home for thousands of Snowbirds who were spending their summers in New York and New England. Snowbirds, I learned, are so-called because they fly south for the winter – flocks of retired New Yorkers escaping several brutally cold months or scraping ice of the windscreen and snow off the driveway in favour of the balmier climes of Sarasota, Miami, Tampa and Clearwater. Now that the ice had melted they were headed home again. It did also mean every dinner felt like a Woody Allen film: for New Yorkers, all the world really is a stage, and they project as though playing to an audience. All around us we overheard whole, angst-ridden conversations that didn’t seem to have any particular substance, but were delivered nonetheless with both earnestness and volume by elderly New Yorkers anxiously wringing hands and adjusting ties. “I mean and she just insisted they get a little dog” (pronounced “dawg”) “and I said Miriam, I said, Miriam, what about his allergies? He has allergies, you know, to animals, Ira does, you know, really bad allergies, he can literally come out in a rash and he can’t breathe, and I said, Miriam, I said, do you want to kill him? But she got this dog, this little dog I told her not to get, and, well, he isn’t allergic to the dog, but, you know, it was a close call.”
I’m not ashamed to admit I was hoping for a better punchline.
Our first port of call should have been the Cayman Islands, but they were still twitchy about covid, so at the last minute our itinerary changed and we docked in Key West, which turned out to be the unexpected highlight of the trip. Laid back, pretty and historic in a “hints of a scandal” kind of a way, it was for many years the home of Hemingway and his polydactyl cats, which have bred considerably in the following 80 or so years and now occupy almost every surface of his grand former residence with a smug sense of ownership and a healthy level of disdain for the hundreds of visitors who pass through each day. A brief tour of the house was worth every penny even though I have no time for his alcohol-fuelled machismo.
After a march around the rest of the island and a world of surprises including a stunningly beautiful cathedral, numerous free-roaming chickens and their chicks, and a garden full of heads of famous people who (with the exception of Hemingway) had largely tenuous links with Key West but were honoured in statue form nonetheless, we got back on board and out of US waters.
tuesdayinbucharest 