Shuffler Cruise Axioms
Helpful Travel Hints 2025
Cruise Ships
February 2026 Update
I avoided cruise ships most of my life. I am pretty intolerant of large crowds of people and, being a country boy at heart, prefer peace and quiet over constant noise, loudspeakers, and non-stop music. However, in retirement, I have set a goal of visiting at least 100 countries. While I have navigated through 86 countries, many harsh in the course of work, my child bride of 45 years doesn’t trust me to find my way to Walmart and back home. So the compromise was to start taking cruises. Just like my helpful travel emails, I realized I could contribute to making humankind better by sharing general observations on cruising. These are general observations. For actual cruises, see the write-ups on Antarctica, Panama Canal, or Greenland/Iceland, three cruises I highly recommend. Coming in a month or so will be a write-up about a Danube River cruise thru Eastern Europe.
Cruise Observations
This list is most helpful for those that have never cruised and have no idea what the environment is on a cruise ship. For the same reason, it is just as helpful to those who have cruised a lot, but always purchased the drink package.
1) The longer the cruise, the older the average age of the passengers. This is because the longer cruises eat up too much vacation or interfere with school schedules for younger cruisers. Unless they’re French. French workers have over 400 days of vacation each year.
2) No old person on a cruise ship considers themselves immobile. In fact, a few are as spry as Mount Rushmore. Although, if you found yourself following Mount Rushmore, you’d be moving at a faster pace. On a 14 day cruise across the Atlantic, I suspect a couple of the older passengers never made it to their stateroom. From embarkation, they shuffled toward their room as an ultimate goal, but before they arrived, the 14 days were up and it was time to turn around and begin the shuffle toward disembarkation.
3) Every ship has a fully equiped exercise facilty and a gigantic buffet. It appears you can only use one or the other. Most passengers using the exercise facilty appear to avoid the buffet and most persons in the buffet definitely appear to have never visited an exercise facilty.
4) People who sit on the front rows of an onboard show with a magician, hypnotist, improv commedian or other act with audience participation should probably seek counseling. Wives or husbands of these individuals would be best advised to consult divorce lawyers. Used car and time share salespersons should flock to them.
5) Runners are the persons who can’t follow instructions on when to return to the ship. If the ship calls out individual names on the loudspeaker at the time the ship is scheduled to depart a port of call, someone has not made it back. It can be entertaining to locate a spot where you can watch the gangway at the last minute and cheer or jeer the antics of late arrivals and mark them for identification throughout the remainder of the cruise. You’ll probably see them upfront at tonight’s show.
6) Except for a few stick-in-the-mud cruise lines, be advised duck season starts upon embarkation. Fun passengers bring rubber ducks of all makes and sizes and hide them around the ship. Kids (ages 2-100) then take great joy in finding a duck in the most out of the way places.
7) Check the mooring lines tying the ship to the pier. Do all the lines have a perpendicular circle disk? That prevents rats from running the mooring lines and boarding your ship! Yes, rats! If you see some mooring lines without disks, be afraid. Be very afraid.
8) Pineapples! If clothing or magnetic cabin door decorations show pineapples, that is the universal cruising code for swingers. If you see a lot of pineapple decor, be afraid. Be very afraid.
9) So you’ve paid a significant amount of money to cruise to these exotic destinations all you have to do is sit back and relax, right? Wrong! At each port, you have the option of wandering around in the crime-riddled part of town next to the port…or, you can purchase an excursion to a paradise that is only attainable (so it seems) by a cruise-arranged tour. Excursion is from the old English combination of “ex”, as it used to be your money, and “cursing”, as in cursing. As an added benefit, you show up early, sit for an hour in the staging area, usually the ship auditorium, waiting with all the other passengers for your tour to be called and then line up behind the slowest people on the ship and the people who talked instead of listening to the instructions blocking all gangways off the ship while your bus is pulling away. The excursions are to cruises what a warranty is to a new car. When you are looking for a new car, the car the salesman is representing is the “best, most reliable car ever built anywhere.” “The last time one of these models broke down was during the Clinton administration.” Then once you buy the car, a second salesman, often called the manager or finance person, will try to sell you the extended warranty because without it, “the car may not make it to the street before you incur thousands in uncovered repairs.”
10) An alternative to ship excursions are purchasing direct from locals. Some of these can be found on the internet and some can be found once on shore by several dozen people holding signs and hawking their tour. Depending on location, the prices can be negotiable. We got a tour to the Godafoss Falls in Iceland at half the asking price, which was already much less than the ship’s price, by offering USD cash. But caution - the one advantage the ship arranged excursions have is that they will ensure you make it back to the ship. This includes waiting on you, or in extreme situations, arranging for you to catch up at the next port. Not so for passengers out on their own. I tend to look to the local tours where I feel I could make alternate arrangements (e.g. Uber/Taxi) back if a problem developes. For longer trips that take up most of the time in port, I rely on the ship arranged excursions.
11) POB is Persons on Board and is a marine requirement that seagoing vessels always know exactly who is on board in case of an emergency. Therefore, you have to show and have scanned your ship ID anytime you exit or enter the ship so they can know who is on board at any point in time. About half the passengers don’t know their ship ID is required to exit or enter since the crew only announces it before every port, tell everyone as they approach the gangway out of or into the ship and have signs at all exits or entrances. These people fill up the gaps in the hall you were hoping to pass through on the gangway deck not occupied by the old persons still headed to their stateroom.
12) The security screening to reenter the ship at every port works exactly like every airport security screening in the world. So there is no way anyone could possibly know how to put things on the x-ray machine belt or to not walk through the metal detector with a phone, sack of iron, or enough old lady metal broaches to qualify as a bullet-proof blouse.