There is one belief I have held throughout my entire life: I am not meant to be on a cruise ship.
I'm what my family has always called a "lake baby." There's nothing I enjoy more than a trip to the lake where I spend countless hours in my Papa's boat, whether just taking a nap on the bow or being dragged around in a giant tube... whatever the activity, I'm down.
However, a boat that goes in the lake is vastly different from a CRUISE SHIP.
If you're one of the many that have been on a cruise, congratulations that luck was on your side and you're still here with us, reading this now. And if you're one of those many and you're shaking your head at me right now, please let me justify my crazy. Read on.
The Titanic
This one needs about a million subtitles, but I'll choose two.
Obviously enough, it sank. And killed 1,517 out of the 2,223 passengers.
Also, its captain willingly ignored multiple warnings that they were headed towards danger, because he thought the Titanic was "unsinkable." If there's one thing you can usually depend on to ruin something, its a man's ego and pride.
(Side note: I did a report on the Titanic in the third grade. Maybe if I hadn't done all that research on the ship that killed over 1,500 people when I was only 8 years old, I wouldn't have this irrational fear. But here we are.)
The Viking Sky Cruise Ship
Recently (like last week, people. Advanced technology has done NOTHING for us) a Viking Sky cruise ship was stranded just off the coast of Norway when three of its four engines stopped working.
It was caught in a "bomb cyclone" and since I love meteorology, I did some research and found out that this is a term meteorologists use to refer to a rapidly intensifying area of low pressure. During a "bomb cyclone," you'll see very intense wind gusts, coastal flooding, and heavy rain.
Basically, the winds picked up and started tossing that ship from side to side like a palm tree in a hurricane. Glass was breaking, rooms were flooding. The passengers had to be airlifted off the ship. No, thank you.
Carnival Triumph
Imagine being stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for over a week with thousands of strangers, no power, no air conditioning, and a septic system that doesn't work.
The Costa Concordia
In 2012, this cruise ship hit a rock a mere 4 hours into its journey, and instead of the captain deciding to start evacuating people immediately, he kept on sailing and the ship sunk soon after in the dark of the night, killing 32 people. Their emergency trainings were scheduled for the next morning, so the passengers didn't even know where to go or what to do in the event of an emergency when the ship went down.
People compared this tragedy to the Titanic since the blame rests on the captain of the ship. If my life rests in the hands of a captain who isn't going to put his passengers' lives before anything else, count me out.
And these are only five of thousands of other disasters. Maybe I'm being irrational, but at least my body won't be in the middle of the ocean when I meet my maker.
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