My mates and I went on a cruise to meet girls. It went better than expected ... for some of us |
I was 18 years old, hungover, and highly impressionable when my mate Dean dragged me into the travel agent (remember them?) one Saturday morning and cajoled me into joining him on what the American writer David Foster Wallace once referred to as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
An ocean cruise.
Dean, a couple of years older than me and the closest thing I had to a brother, had just come back from one such bacchanal, aboard the P&O ship Oriana. And in the downstairs bar of Caesar’s Palace in Ipswich, Queensland one Friday night, my mate Richard and I downed Bundy and Cokes and sat enthralled as Dean regaled us with tales as fabulous to our girl-crazy, booze-soaked ears as anything from The 1001 Arabian Nights.
The P&O ocean liner SS Canberra, colloquially known as the Great White Whale. The ship operated from 1961 to 1997, and was briefly requisitioned by the UK government in 1982 to transport troops to the Falkland Islands. Credit: Internet
“It was incredible,” he told us. “The drinks were cheap, the food was free, and the ship was full of beautiful women.”
I can’t really recall anything else he said after that, because it was enough.
That night, Richard and I crashed at Dean’s parents’ house; the next morning, the three of us went into town and booked our passage, as we old sea dogs like to say, on the 14-day Christmas-New Year cruise aboard the Oriana’s sister ship, the SS Canberra, sailing out of........