Not everyone flies. Sometimes it may, in fact, still be more convenient, more fun, and less expensive to go by car, bus, or train – or to take a cruise. This chapter provides background about travel on vehicles that move on water or wheels.

Wetting the Whistle

Modern cruise ships are arguably the one mode of transportation that are also, to some, a destination in and of themselves. No one, for example, would think of a modern airplane in quite this way, not even while encamped in the plushest of first-class cabins. On a cruise, the ambiguity of purpose, however, is not unintentional. It is instead an important aspect and also the desired outcome of earnest marketing campaigns designed to stimulate in the middle-class traveler's mind the most Sybaritic of fantasies. As such, the modern cruise ship operates as much as a floating hotel-resort as it does as a means of carriage.

Fantasy islands

Although ships have been transporting passengers since the beginning of time, the first cruises were conducted by the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which ran vessels from Britain to Spain and Portugal and to Malaysia and China beginning in 1844. And, the “first American-originated cruise was probably the 1867 voyage of the paddle-wheel steamer Quaker City from New York.” This adventure in which people would promenade the deck in the evening, sing hymns, and listen to organ music was advertised as an excursion to Egypt, the Crimea, Greece, and other such places of interest.