There’s a lot about cruises I’d rather not touch on. There’s a lot of food, for starters: a buffet line and themed cuisine for every hour of the day; a lot of people in line for food, even at 3 p.m. when the lunch trays have barely been cleared away and dinner’s already looming; a lot of deck chairs occupied by scowling place-savers whose Bahamaventions seem not to have yet kicked in—who regard one’s position on the promenade as competitively as they probably jostle for slots on the 6 train; a lot of loudspeaker announcements; a lot of souvenir shops; a lot of herding. A lot of stomach bugs!

But there are a lot of perks, too; luxuries I wouldn’t mind re-experiencing. The bed, for example: ENORMOUS and with the smoothest, softest sheets imaginable. Even with the Caribbean calling it was hard to leave that bed. And the balcony: there’s nothing quite like sitting outside at sunset with a book while the waves slosh below you. And the pina coladas went a long way towards drowning out the sound of the emcee’d limbo competitions.

The best and most memorable part of my cruise, however, had nothing to do with 1200-count sheets or with a sign-n’-swipe card…

Disembarking in Costa Maya—a “town” “built specially for cruise ships!”—my boyfriend and I took one aghast look around us at the walled-in shopping mall and in rudimentary Spanish asked the first person we saw for directions to the nearest beach. He put us on a bus, where for a few dollars we were dropped off ten minutes down the road in the coastal town of Mahahual (accompanied now too by my boyfriend’s sister and her husband and their eighteen-month-old son, who had charmed every passport official between here and Orlando).

We headed down the sandy path towards the beach. It was still before noon, but the sun was already blazing merrily down. Delighted, we dropped our backpacks and set up camp oceanside, ordering guacamole and a bucket of Coronas from the owner of the beach umbrella we borrowed. We could see two or three mammoth cruise ships parked alongside each other on the horizon—but if you looked up instead of out, all you could see were palm tree leaves.

It was a great day.

Five hours later we were all of us (except the baby, who’d had four overprotective minders judiciously applying sunscreen every half-hour) burned to a crisp. We had sand in our shorts and sea salt in our swimsuits. We were stuffed with fish tacos and fried plantains and sleepy from that last bucket of beer. We had a camera full of pictures of one very happy, waterlogged baby and four very happy, finally relaxed adults.

Back on the ship, those amazing sheets soothed our sunburns. Drifting off, to sea and to a late-afternoon nap, I drowsily felt ready for anything…even the impending captain’s dinner.

- by Laura Arnold

photo by Liz Saucier