This week’s travel dream: The conversion of a cruise-ship skeptic

Hard as it is for me to believe it, I’m now an ardent fan of cruises, said Pico Iyer in Condé Nast Traveler. “For three decades, at least,” I viewed the cruise industry as “the enemy of everything I cherish as a solitary traveler.” The thought of those enormous white ships conjured images of “marauding tourists” storming once-quiet ports and leveling local idiosyncrasies. But that all changed a few years ago when I took a cruise with my mother, then nearing 80 and finding it less fun than before to take trips that required packing and unpacking every day. The experience delighted her and proved to be “infinitely richer than I’d expected.”

My mother and I cruised the Baltic recently, on a ship—the Emerald Princess—that boasted an art gallery, a basketball court, a putting course, and a casino. For me, though, it’s the other passengers who make life onboard these ships enjoyable, because I relish meeting “the kind of people I too seldom encounter in my day-to-day life.” On the Emerald Princess, I met a Montreal stockbroker who’d just taken the ship’s flower-arranging class, a friendly Chinese acupuncturist from L.A., and the acupuncturist’s partner, who’d once worked as a mime in Japan. Meanwhile, it was a treat just to watch my mother come alive when the piano played “Begin the Beguine,” or to see her happily studying matryoshka dolls near the photo gallery before she headed off to a magic show.

What’s best about cruises is that they expose me to places I wouldn’t otherwise have decided to see. “I knew I had to visit St. Petersburg,” for instance, “but who’d have guessed I’d be entranced by Warnemünde,” a pretty little port on Germany’s northern coast? There’s a lot to be said for staying in a “comfortable floating hotel” and never having your energy drained by the hassles of visas and train schedules and currency-exchange pit stops. “Every day when we awoke, some new wonder was appearing right outside our window.”

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To book a trip on the Emerald Princess, visit princess.com. Various cruise lines have been offering discounts since the January capsizing of the Costa Concordia, and we’ve included a sample in Last-minute travel deals.