Destination: West Indies

RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (Jim Champion photo)

In 1975 I discovered the joys of travel on a cruise ship.

It began in the early 1970s when my friend Walter and I decided we'd like to give cruising a try. We plotted and planned, read brochures and travel guides, and decided to try an April departure from Norfolk on a Greek ship, Queen Anna Maria.

Over the years, I've forgotten what stops we made, but a menu I snagged from dinner on April 15, 1974, says our destination was the West Indies. Two memories do remain with some clarity, however: the simply amazing experience of sailing, and the food. Anna Maria was not a new ship. She was launched in 1956, christened by Queen Elizabeth II as Empress of Britain. She was 640 feet long, had one funnel, one mast and twin propellers. In 1964, she was sold to the Greek Line and renamed Queen Anna Maria.

(Two years after we sailed on her, she was sold to Carnival Cruise Lines and was re-named yet again, becoming Carnivale. She was sold and re-named several more times before 2008, when she was beached in Alang, India, to be scrapped.)

The chef's suggestions from that Monday-evening dinner on Anna Maria were emblematic of cruise-ship excess: cream soup Pritaniére, poached pike Dieppoise with Hollandaise sauce, veal cutlet with sweet cheese, glazed squash, mashed potatoes, Sicilian salad, and strawberry shortcake. Other entrée choices included Greek baked lamb, paella, and leg of pork. Unfortunately I neglected to save menus from breakfast, morning bouillon, lunch, afternoon tea, and the midnight buffet. To my then-inexperienced eyes, the amount of food available seemed overwhelming.

Once Walter and I had experienced traveling by ship, we spent the remainder of the decade vacationing on liners that visited probably half of the islands in the Caribbean, plus Bermuda and the north coast of South America.

In May 1975, we sailed to the Caribbean from San Juan on Carla C, a voyage that was marked by the overwhelming number of teenagers from Puerto Rico who were celebrating their high-school graduation. And in October 1976, we sailed on Mardi Gras to Bermuda.

Our Caribbean cruise adventures ended with a sailing on Queen Elizabeth 2 in November 1977. She was the greatest, without a doubt. A Cunard liner, QE2 was designed for transatlantic service from Southampton, England, to New York. She served as the flagship of the line beginning in 1969. Built in Clydebank, Scotland, she was considered to be among the great transatlantic ships before she was succeeded more than four decades later by Queen Mary 2. When last I heard, QE2 was moored in Dubai, awaiting an uncertain future.

In the decades following our adventures at sea in the 1970s, the cruise industry burgeoned almost unimaginably. Today, there are more cruising opportunities than you can shake a stick at.

But my vacations on magnificent ships ended with my trip on QE2. There are worse ways to put paid to a decade of extraordinary experiences at sea.

I didn't lose my love for cruise ships. No, the reason I stopped was far more prosaic, occasioned by a shift in spending priorities.

In 1980, I bought a house.