My parents were cruisers (yes, that sounds funny for a couple who were in their 20s-30s in the 70s). My husband and I are not. While my parents traveled with us to Europe regularly, as they got older (and became empty nesters) the allure of packing and unpacking once, and having their mode of transport, hotel, and restaurant be all in one was, well, alluring to them. They enjoyed cruise culture as it was back then: the afternoon teas, dressing up for dinner, having a massage (or four -- that would be my mother) and having her hair and nails done, sitting on their cabin's balcony for a leisurely breakfast and feeling the ocean breeze, ending the day on the balcony and feeling more of the ocean breeze.

I now take my mother on a yearly cruise, but I admit it is not what she has described: it all feels at once a bit flashy and Vegas-y while there is no dressing up for anything and there is an upcharge for things like the good restaurants and the classes my parents once took for granted. I think the sort of cruises my parents once took still exist, only not on the routes my mother likes to take. Oh, well.

My husband is sniffing around the "new" Queen Mary (now not so new, I suppose), which he saw on some engineering show on television (yes, we are both nerds). He sort of wants to go, but I don't know if it would be worth it now. OTOH, it sounds like it still has the afternoon teas and old-fashioned gentility I like.

All right, enough rambling.