Snobs Or Mobs
The Source
I don’t like snobs . . . especially when they look at me down the full length of their nose and tell me, “Oh, I don’t do group travel. I’m independent.” It’s easy to spot these independent travelers when you’re traveling abroad or domestically with a group. They’re the ones who are still searching for a hotel in London while you’re touring the Tate Gallery. They’re the “independent souls” who are left stranded in the bus terminal in Paris as your pre-booked choo-choo steams out of the station. And most notably, they’re often the ones who paid $2000 for their airfare to Australia while you sit in the row of ahead of them with a $900 ticket made affordable because you used a tour company who buys plane tickets by the thousand. I don’t like group travel, I love group travel. You make one call, tell the tour company or your local travel club with a neighborhood bank that you’d like to go to Yosemite then you sit back and let them do the work. It’s still a standard of the industry that the booking fee comes off the tour company and not you. Who wouldn’t love that? Yes, you are automatically yoked with God-knows-who as your fellow travelers, but in general I’ve found them to be a delightful lot. Sure, you might have a whiner who can’t understand why they give you only one ice cube in your Italian Pepsi, but the independent traveler at the next table is drinking cola of the same temperature. Yes, you may have to wait a bit while a couple of your co-journey-women sate their shopping frenzy in Geneva, but when you’re late for supper your tour guide can do the explaining. I’ve yet to see a European restaurant that won’t jump at the chance to serve 40 Americans with dollars in their pockets. The independent traveler will be eating at McDonalds. And of course the best group travel of all is to be found on a cruise. The cruise, whether through the glacier fields of Alaska or the sunny beaches of the Caribbean, combines the best of both worlds: the lowest prices and a ship so huge that you never see your fellow travelers unless you choose to dine with them. I’ll come clean and confess it: I’m a cruise nut. I love cruises. I don’t even care where the ship is going, just get me on it and I’ll ride. I’ve cruised Alaska’s Inside Passage, the waters of the Caribbean, and a bit of the Mediterranean and have yet to meet a cruise that I didn’t simply adore. And my reason is purely hedonistic: They pamper you. I’ve lived around the Jacksonville area all my life and I’ve yet to have someone sneak into my bedroom before I turn in and magically twist my bath towels into cute little bunnies or octopi. Maybe you live in a different part of the neighborhood, but it’s just not standard practice around here. And even the luscious Arenzville Burgoo doesn’t offer seven course meals complete with a little guy whose only job is to keep the crumbs scraped off the table. He has a silver crumb scraper in his pocket. I’m not kidding. I leave my cruise cabin at 8 a.m. and when I return after breakfast my bed is made. If I sit on it at 9:15 then go out to watch humpback whales, someone will have straightened my covers before 10. I don’t know where these shadowy cabin stewards hide, but I suspect they’re tucked into the ceiling of my stateroom. And of course on a cruise you travel under the delightful delusion that everything is free. …the food, the shows, the soft drinks, the thousand little amenities that lets even the most common guy from Perry, Illinois, think he’s Donald Trump. Okay, Donald may be a couple decks up, but when we walk the deck we are equal…and I don’t have to worry about my hair being blown about by a sudden gust off the coast of Nassau. I’ve often looked at the approaching shore of Nome, Alaska, and thought of my friends who’ve sneered, “I don’t cruise Alaska. I drive my own car and see the interior of the state.” Good for you, Daniel Boone, and after driving two weeks on the nation’s most pock-filled roads, paying the highest food and petrol prices and staying in a roadside cabin infested by black flies, I’ll wave at you from the Lido Deck, coffee and crumpet in hand. And look out, there’s bear behind you. So call me spoiled, call me unadventurous, call me a wimp, but if you do, you’ll have to call the cruise lines. They’ll have my number. We’re heading for Alaska next summer. Climb aboard or pump up the air in your bike tires.