The Seven People You Meet on a Cruise

It’s as inevitable as death and taxes: Later in life, you will cruise. And these people will be waiting for you on the poop deck.

The graphic essay below was both written and illustrated by

Peter Moore

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FOR MOST OF MY LIFE, I was too cool to cruise. I was an adventurer, dammit. Not a chaise lounger aboard some titanic vessel! And yet, soon after my first copy of AARP: The Magazine arrived, I swam like a salmon upstream to my burial ground—an AAA tourism office—to inquire about Alaska.

I, too, would cruise.

You feel the attraction, right? So do these people:

1. The social director. She will meet you. She will greet you. She will talk and talk and TALK. And if she smiled any more her cheeks would crack.

2. Cruise veterans. They will inform you that, no, you’re not having as much fun as you think.

3. That guy who read up on your destination. When he draws a breath to speak, run.

   

4. The wine steward. Tip generously as he pours the anesthesia.

   

5. The people who are having much more fun than you are. F.O.M.O hits hard, especially when you’re already doing the most self-indulgent thing possible.

   

6. The fitness director. It costs extra to sail on a ship without one.

   

7. The Most Feared Person on the Seven Seas. Not Blackbeard the Pirate. The $hip bur$ar! Martinis don’t grow on trees, people.

   

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Peter Moore is a columnist and cartoonist for The Colorado Sun, and a commentator and animator for Front Range NPR. You can find more of his work, plus an illustrated account of his cruise down the Danube, at peter moore.substack.com. Previously Peter Moore responded to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire via illustration, and later answered five more questions in the same fashion.