Can You Feed Your Desired Sense of Adventure On a Cruise?

If you happened to go to the blog link for my last email, you may have watched the first-time Princess Cruiser video.

Yes, that assumes you not only read the newsletter but then clicked on the appropriate link and then actually watched one of five embedded videos.

Stretching my assumptions further, you have watched the last minute of that video to get to this point.  Humor me.

The young reviewer said he found the cruise had been "an overwhelmingly positive" experience, and he had trouble coming up with any negatives.  That's how I feel about every cruise I have been on.

Being a critic, however, the young man had to come up with a negative.  He posited that the structured approach of cruises did not offer the opportunity to "get off the beaten path" to seek out adventure. 

"One of the things that makes travel what it is is not knowing what is going to happen next."

I beg to differ with his premise, because you can seek out adventure in every port, if you so desire.

While I recommend booking shore excursions as well as your cruises in advance to ensure the best possible travel experience --- and booking excursions with the cruise line can make that a very safe choice --- you can always simply go ashore and find your own adventure, just as long as you make a point of getting back to the ship an hour before she sails.

I would say to not take undo risk whether on a cruise or traveling independently, but you don't have to always choose the safest.  This is particularly true if you are healthy and fit.

Taking a bus with the locals in an exotic location feels a bit risky, but if you have read up on the port before your trip --- even just perusing excursions offered by the cruise line, which will provide lots of great hints of where to go and what to do --- and you stay aware of your circumstances, you can feel a sense of adventure and discovery anywhere in the world.

And then, you return to your floating home-away-from-home.  While we may like watching movies where Tom Cruise is living on the razor's edge for 2 1/2 hours and still only making it halfway through his impossible mission, most of us like to relax after a day exploring.

"There's not a lot of uncertainty in this experience," the young videographer said.  That I would say comes down to the fact that life is boring to boring people.  And I don't think this videographer believes it. The only time he mentioned not going on a sponsored excursion was in Curacao, where he rightly said the lovely port city of Willemstad has shops and bars geared to tourists. When we were in Curacao, however, Julie and I took local buses to far off beaches and had that sense of discovery.

Further, the more exotic the itinerary, the more we appreciate returning to our ship to relax in utter safety in comfortable environs where everyone speaks English

Far from a disadvantage, I find that element of certainty at the end of the day makes cruising the best way to experience the world.

And make no mistake, while the evening news may try to scare you into believing that many people in the world hate us for being Americans, most people we meet everywhere are gracious hosts and welcome our tourist dollars, which in many cases are the lifeblood of their economies.