Great Liners Story
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Great Liners Story - William H. Miller
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INTRODUCTION
‘The first experience can never be I repeated,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘That first love, that first sunrise, that first South Sea island, are memories apart, and touched by a virginity of sense.’ And so, in ways, it would be the same for my very first voyage on the largest passenger ship ever created.
Most fortunately, I have sailed aboard over 400 ships and to ports throughout the world. But on January 2011, I had a great treat: to sail aboard the largest ocean liner afloat, the mammoth Allure of the Seas. We departed from the world’s busiest cruise port, Fort Lauderdale in Florida, for a week in the sun-drenched Caribbean.
Change cruise ships and let’s dance! After disembarking from the 92,000-ton, 2,000-bed Queen Elizabeth (on a crossing from Southampton to New York and then Florida), we boarded the 225,000-ton, 6,400-passenger Allure of the Seas. She’s even a tad bigger (just 2 inches actually) than her otherwise twin sister, the Oasis of the Seas. So, she makes my record book – she is my very first super mega-liner! The mind boggles, my eyes wide, my imagination deeply tweaked. The 1,187ft-long Allure (that’s some 50ft longer than the 151,000-ton Queen Mary 2), a towering 213ft high, is every inch the ‘floating vacation resort’. Yes, a ship that is more – no, much more – than just another ‘floating hotel’. Completely, I’m dazzled! But for sure, she could have been named Colossus of the Seas.
I’m not alone in being over-impressed. A friend from Florida, who just happens to be aboard, smilingly commented, ‘This ship is just magical! It is like another world, a world that is creative and beautiful, but also fantasy-like, even child-like. It is a ship where dreams come true. It is the most remarkable creation ever to sail the seas. And you never, ever feel that there are 6,000 other passengers on board.’
Today, nine liners are ‘parked’ together in Port Everglades. The ‘gang’ includes the likes of the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, Celebrity Solstice, MSC Poesia and two Holland America ships among them. It is estimated that well over 20,000 passengers are arriving and, of course, then over 20,000 departing and all before the south Florida sun sets. A new mega-cruise terminal befits the Allure and the boarding process takes – with smiles everywhere and quite extraordinarily – just a few minutes. We are whisked through security, checked in at break-neck speed and then cross a glasstubed gangway and board this behemoth of the seas!
Like some Manhattan skyscraper, we are quickly off to our cabin up on Deck 12 (out of the ship’s soaring seventeen decks and said to be equal to a twenty-storey building on shore). Beginning with our Indonesian cabin steward, it is all friendly smiles and chatter and those much needed, helpful directions from step one. Immediately, one senses, the Allure of the Seas is not only the biggest liner afloat, but the friendliest! Pure, absolute charm from Royal Caribbean International, the Miami-based owners of the ship and themselves owned by super-rich Norwegian shipowners (the Wilhelmsen Lines) and Chicago-based hoteliers (the Pritzker family and their Hyatt Regency chain)! In total, there’s a staggering 2,384 crew on board from no fewer than eighty nations.
Our stateroom has a balcony, but one which overlooks the ship’s inner core, the vast, open-air courtyard of sorts, that is done decks below as a recreated Central