As I might have noted, on my 36th birthday, some four weeks ago, I feel on the ice at my place of work, breaking my right ankle.  This happened nearly three months into working out and improving my diet.  Naturally this new self-improvement regime had a cruise set as the reward for reaching my goals.

Thankfully after one month, I’ve actually lost a goodly amount of weight, the ankle is healing nicely, and my mind is turning towards rehabilitating and resuming life.   The cruise is now a prime motivator for me.  What ship, I haven’t decided, but I’ll figure that out later.

In any case, visions of boarding a big white ship, the sound of the PA tone, even that cruise ship smell give me a bit of a push when hobbling around on crutches gets old.

Ever since 9/11, it seems as if people are gun-shy about doing anything fun after a tragic event.  Where it is fine and appropriate to seek to respect people, or an area after something unfortunate happens, I can’t help but feel people are trying too hard to find fault in Royal Caribbean sending ships to their resort at Labadee.

There was little to no damage to the area where the resort is located.  The local people depend on the ships for their income.  Relief supplies are arriving from those ships, at one of the few entry points in the entire country.  If the ships didn’t stop there, they would simply go someplace else, or no-place at all.  Yet the ships would sail all the same.  People would revel in the joy of a cruise anyway.  The world would continues to move on.

Yet I read headlines over articles, such as “Is it ethical for cruise ships to return to Haiti yet?”  What kind of a flaming moron poses such a question?   Ethical?  I suppose letting people fall into unemployment, leaving the relief supplies in Miami, and stopping in the U.S. Virgin Islands, simply because weak minds can’t separate the issues in one part of Haiti from another, is the only “ethical” response to the disaster.  Yes, we must make everything worse, because we sop to some adolescent reaction to something fun being anyplace near a disaster.

Pathetic.

I do not know from where yet, but I fully expect to find articles like this grow as the same groups that attack the cruise industry hunt for ways to exploit what they think is a new entry point to make themselves heard.

Royal Caribbean’s response has been precisely what it should be.  Any person that can not assert the intelligence and maturity to see the situations in play for what they are, and acknowledge the appropriate nature of the response, has issues of their own to deal with.

I’ll be taking the next couple of days off during the holiday, but will see everybody back here Friday the 26th!

Until then, one last stock quote!

Visit www.RoyalCaribbeanFan.com

Royal Caribbean is seeking to aid travel agents by boosting commissions and assisting with deposit amounts and such.  The details are the kind of travel agent specific thing I actively avoid dragging into my posts.  Suffice to say the aim is to both help travel agents bottom line and make bookings a bit easier to sell during exceptionally tough times.

I read recently that the number of people conducting searches online for “discount cruises” is at an all-time high.  When people worry about the future of the industry, to say nothing of my beloved Royal Caribbean, it is this last point among others, which I point too.  The industry has proven highly resilient to the economy.  Certainly, smaller lines have suffered and failed in the past.  Likewise, it is certain we will yet read of some smaller lines having problems.  However industry bookings only soften recently, and people still have the want and urge to cruise.  I still plan on booking my next two cruises early next year.

For those who visit my site, I do hope you’ll consider signing up for the message board.  I do not use registration information for any purpose other than keeping the site secure.  Nothing prompts conversation like a few new faces, and my hope is to more than double membership in the coming eight weeks.  Getting over the critical mass of posts needed to get things rolling is key.

As you will see early next year, there are some great things coming.  In January I will be starting a modest podcast in conjunction with the blog.  We will be featuring a long series of interviews with members of the Royal Caribbean International community as part of “Ten Questions with Royal Caribbean Fan.  Members will be able to post large and attractive galleries of photos for free, along with the ability to create your own cruise blog.  Royal Caribbean Fan will also have its own “Cruise Ticker” you can use here and on other sites, to add your own countdown to message board signatures and more!  There will be a dedicated Oasis of the Seas section, completed fleet dossiers, expanded history, daily blog posts, and more!   This will be the big year for Royal Caribbean Fan, and the single most important part of that is you!  I hope you’ll enjoy and use all the great new features!

Not as fun, but news all the same, today’s stock numbers!

Join today, free, www.RoyalCaribbeanFan.com

Hurricane Gustav blew through northwestern Ohio last week.  With it, as always with these things, a blast of warm, moist air passed through the region.  Like no other time than these occasional moments, does it feel as much like being on a cruise ship.  There is a smell to the air, which has to be matched with the right combination of humidity and temperature, which almost perfectly duplicates that which you experience when walking out on deck.  In particular, even a couple of days before Gustav actually reached us, the air was exactly as it is at Labadee in the morning.

Predictably, for the last week I have been deep into pondering my next cruise.  Oasis of the Seas is a given, but waiting until May of 2010 seems unbearable.  Liz and I are considering taking separate vacations, handing the kids off to the “parent of the watch.”  Her preference hasn’t been to take a cruise, which opens things up to my taking one on my own.  Free of the kids, until they are older, solves a pressing matter of money, that until we came up with this new spin, had stood in the way of getting back to a regular slate of cruising.

Time will tell how that  unfolds.

So if Oasis is set for ‘10, this opens the question of what ship to take between now and then?

*****
Visit www.CruiseAficionados.com, www.RoyalCaribbeanFan.com, www.CelebrityCruiseFans.com, or www.CruiseTravelGear.com and be a part of our growing community!