I had my familymoon last week. That’s like a honeymoon, but in our case included our two kids (6 and 9) plus two sets of grandparents. Our brilliant plan was to enroll the kids in the spectacular child activity centers offered on the Disney Magic cruise ship to the Western Caribbean. Once checked in, the kids would be entertained with a plethora of games and activities that would stimulate and delight them. This would leave the adults free to do adultish things. Everyone wins.
Unfortunately, our kids only have one question when it comes to entertainment: Who else will be there?
It turns out that our answer – “a bunch of strangers” – did not please them, especially after they tried it. So Plan B went into effect, and that meant continuously trying to figure out how to entertain eight very different people, ages 6 to 79, without everyone going their own way and defeating the purpose of the trip. It was like solving a Rubik’s Cube seven times a day.
Several of us have difficult preferences to satisfy. For example, I can’t be in the sun for more than ten seconds without bursting into flames. I fall sound asleep in any darkened theater. I’m a vegetarian, I require shaded temperatures between 68 and 75 degrees and continuous access to the Internet. Now throw the other seven freaks of nature into the equation and try to optimize everyone’s happiness without generating a slap fight. It can’t be done.
Just to make things extra interesting, our 6-year old is terrified of costumed characters, and the ship is full of them. He decided that Goofy and Pluto weren’t so bad, being dogs. But Mickey, Minnie, Chip and Dale are huge rodents on helium. You never really know if they plan to hug you or disembowel you. It’s anyone’s guess.
Now add to the mix my 79-year old Dad who can’t walk more than 100 yards because of a recent bum leg, and you start to get a sense of how hard it is to optimize the joy of eight humans faced with dozens of ever-changing potential activities. Do you make the vegetarian go to the barbecue or make the gimp do the walking tour? Should we take the 6-year old to certain death at the hands of giant chipmunks or take grandma to the bikini beach? Someone has to lose.
Despite these challenges, we managed to have great fun, but never in ways that you would have expected. For example, the cruise ship has a movie theater that shows current Disney films, including Pirates of the Caribbean II. This is perhaps the coolest movie you can watch while on a cruise ship that is itself in motion. I actually felt like I was on the pirate ship. The only downside is that for the rest of the trip, every irregularity in the ocean looked as if Davy Jones’ giant tentacles were about to suction me off the ship. So I added to my list of activity filters “nothing involving looking at the ocean.” It had a surprisingly small impact on our planning, which devolved into mostly gorging on food, playing bingo, getting our pictures taken by professionals and debating which of those pictures made us look the least grotesque.
Allow me to explain the business model of a cruise ship. When you set sail, the ship has a billion tons of food and a few thousand humans. The cruise company’s objective is to end the cruise with something on the order of one leftover cupcake and a billion tons of feces. I’m fairly certain that if that goal is not met, a busboy from Mozambique is thrown overboard as a warning to the other crew members. We ate our share just to make sure Pooka Muuwa was safe.
One of my favorite moments came while standing on the balcony off of my stateroom enjoying the ocean view. I felt a sun-induced sneeze come on, and I sensed that it was going to be a big one. My first instinct was to cover my mouth, but I waived off that reflex just in time to launch a majestic spray into the sea. I know that it doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but if you’ve never launched your best screaming, back-arching, full-lunged sneeze into the ocean, you really ought to try cruising.