The Doctor & The Boilermaker
Russell Johnson & Pat Meier-Johnson

He was a Herr Doktor, a demanding, pompous man shaped like a pork sausage. By the second night aboard our Fiji Cruise he was the victim of mass-avoidance. Like Mark Twain's "Old Traveler" he boasted about where he had been, about his prominence as a surgeon, how he was traveling the world while his wife, also a surgeon, stayed at home, tending to the sutures and clamps.

But Jack was a different type.  Everybody took to him immediately. Jack was a big Samoan, a boilermaker by trade who was taking his wife on her first vacation without the kids in 20 years.  Jack became our official chief, our Ratu, in Fijian tribal parlance, and he didn't let go until he broke Herr Doktor.

Aboard the Superstar Leo

Its Captain's night on the Superstar Leo, a 13 deck, 2,000 passenger megaliner sailing the South China Sea. The Leo is an ultramodern, glitzy Malaysian ship, made in Germany with a Swedish Captain and an Aussie Chef. Cruise ship captains are almost always Norwegian or Swedish.Swedes and Norwegians apparently always know where they are going. On this ship, a good number of service staff is Vietnamese. They are personable, extremely good looking and speak very good English.

Santorini, Greece © Russell Johnson

A Luxury Cruise on Seabourn 

Where are the surly waiters? Where are the soggy pommes frites? Where is the water blasting out of the showerhead like an Arctic squall? Where are all of those travel horror stories that you laugh about later?

Some people I know think travel means travail, that Christ-like suffering is honorable and that cruising is sensory euthanasia. I suggest that they "get a life" (albeit an expensive one) and try, just once, one of the luxury cruise ships. A cruise on a good luxury ship can be like floating weightlessly in a bullshit deprivation tank. It can also be quite enjoyable.