We’re back home now and recovering from our jet lag (managing to sleep in til 6 am this morning was a small victory).  We also finally got the suitcases out of the living room and started chipping away at the big pile of laundry.

This evening I spotted an article by Rick Steves that so expressed some of our ideas about cruising. He said he used to think of cruisers and travelers as mutually exclusive categories, but more recently realized there was a hybrid out there.

A first point about cruising is that it is a great way to sample an area to find places you might want to come back and spend more time in.  On a cruise you may not get an in-depth feel for any one place, but you can spend a day in a lot of different ports and get a basic sense for cities you have read about but never experienced.  Even though we were only in Oslo for a few hours, it is now a real place to me and I have some idea of what spending more time there might be like.

A second idea he mentioned regards the cruise line tours.  Once in a while they can be a good way to see something that might otherwise be difficult (like our bus tour from Rotterdam to Amsterdam), but that most of the time it is great to just get off the ship and wander off on your own.  In Honfleur we were SO happy we were not part of the walking tour that went by us, but were just doing our own thing on our own schedule.

I loved Rick’s story about the the passengers who walked 100 yards from the ship, peered around, and then scampered back to the safety of the ship.  While I can’t even fathom it, that does represent at least a reasonable minority of your fellows on board.  At the same time, there are many that share the sense of adventure.  Even when we walked miles to the bus terminal to catch the coach to Honfleur, there was a good group of us doing it together. We also noticed that some of the same people who took the train to Cork were also taking the bus to Honfleur (great minds think alike!).

-M