Amtrekker

Hey Team,

Cruise ships are not a form of transportation. They’re more like huge freaking hotels that you’re locked inside of for 16 hours at a time with a few thousand of your closest friends (provided you don’t have many actual close friends), and when they finally open the gates, you’ve been mysteriously teleported to yet another strange city. I guess teleportation is technically a form of transportation…but let’s not dwell. Here’s my point:

You can’t go around comparing cruise ships to airplanes just because it makes your environmental impact argument sound better. Hell yeah it takes less fuel to fly from Ft. Lauderdale to Grand Cayman than it does to take a boat. Know why? Cause you’re transporting 200 people…not five THOUSAND people in a huge freaking floating city that allows for more entertainment and adventure in exotic locales than the average working class family would have the opportunity to experience during their one and only week of vacation a year by any other means.

And for those people, cruising is perfect. I can’t imagine a better way to get a smattering of everything a great vacation has the potential to offer. Not everyone can drop everything and travel for extended periods. (And for that matter it would be kind of a bummer if they could…who would sell you all the knick-knacks you don’t need at various ports if everyone were off globetrotting?)

In my case, although I had a great time on the cruise, it’s tough to get out of the Amtrekking mindset. I probably got just as much out of wandering around Ft. Lauderdale watching passed out drunk people pulled off of buses while I make phone calls trying to figure out where I’m going to sleep. Once a hobo, always a hobo?

It’s really tough to explain. I think it comes down to chaos. I crave the unknown and live for those moments when the New Jersey beach patrol skids to a stop on their ATVs to tell me that I need to find a better place to sleep than underneath their pier. I’m not going to pretend that those are always fun times. In fact, for they most part they REALLY suck. But…that’s where the best stories come from.

Enough rambling. In short, are you traveling with friends and/or family just trying to relax and maybe see a few sights with your limited time off? Are you looking for an easy all-in-one solution to getting trashed with friends and not having to drive back to the hotel? Do you love seeing new sights but would like to have your hand held in the process? Take a cruise.

Want to explore the world, learn a little more about humanity and collect stories? Want to contract an especially virulent form of drug resistant tuberculosis? Take a bus.

I’m done.

Brett.

Hey Team,

I’ve been sitting here staring at this blank page for a little over twenty minutes now trying to decide what I’d like to write about the Princess Cruise that a handful of twittering travel folk were invited on (and I got to tag along for some reason). I think one of the big problems is that I had more fun than I expected. It’s a tough blow when all of the stupid cruise ship jokes you have prepared don’t quite fit the situation any more. (Case in point, I didn’t get to spend all week fighting sunburned, overweight old men for the pole position at the buffet so my Formula-1 joke is out the window.)

Most importantly however, I’m just not used to writing about great experiences. You guys know better than anyone that 90% of the content on this site is a direct result of me having done something colossally stupid and the mad scramble to either rectify the situation or, barring that, at least come out relatively unscathed. If I have any complaints it’s that I kind of felt like I had my hand held for a week and I wasn’t given the opportunity to fall overboard, flounder at sea for a few days and finally get rescued by the Coast Guard just shy of losing my leg (and/or sea mammal virginity) to an over eager Caribbean dolphin.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to say about the last week, I just felt like I should probably start with an overview. So here it is:

My Overview (in haiku):

Met some great people
Food, folks, fun and alcohol
…lots of alcohol

Bahamas were dull
But I won a ping-pong match
Ha! Take that, David

At Cayman Islands
Snorkeling distracted me
From offshore account

Cozumel is home
To some huge Mayan ruins
And the biggest effing mosquitos you’ve ever seen in your life! (How many syllables was that?)

Roatan has ghosts
I’m told they steal people’s pants
For sure the best stop

May have ADD
Beaches get old fast for me
…what was I saying?

More to come, friends! I’ll try to write a post for each stop, one for the ship, maybe even one on the environmental impact (if everyone else is doing it then I should probably jump on the bandwagon), AND…maybe I’ll get Justin a weirdthings.com post on those pant’s stealing ghosts.

I’m done.

Brett.

I could have made this post WAY longer than it would need to be to satisfy everyone’s curiosity and, as such, it may not make a ton of sense (Let’s be honest, how many of these do anyway?) but at least it was cathartic. As always, thanks for listening.

Hey Team,

I hate Best Buy.

I know what you’re saying, “Brett, you’re such a nice guy. I can’t imagine you being judgmental enough to not be willing to walk a mile in their shoes and try to see things from their perspective. Surely, they aren’t as bad as you would have us believe. In fact, I would venture to say that you are jumping to hasty conclusions and that you’ve probably had perfectly respectable encounters with Best Buy in the past and somehow you must be letting a single negative experience color your views of a fine upstanding company. Frankly, I expected more empathy from you, Brett.”

To you, I have only three things to say.

1. You talk too much.

2. You sound pompous.

3. I HATE Best Buy.

You guys already know that I’m currently somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean thanks to a generous offer from Princess Cruises and Gary at Everything-Everywhere.com. What you may not know is that I was REALLY looking forward to putting some videos together for both the Amtrekker site and Everything-Everywhere.com (and who knows, maybe even WeirdThings.com). It’s well documented that the video camera that served me so well during my Amtrekker travels met with an untimely demise so I figured now was the time to finally put out the dough and upgrade from a worthless pile of parts to something a little higher end.

Traveling through TSA with electronics is kind of a pain but luckily inspiration struck! I could use Best Buy’s brilliant buy-it-online-but-pick-it-up-in-store policy and instead of picking it up in California I could just pick it up in Florida and save me an entire trip across the country with a new piece of equipment. Genius!

Things went wrong pretty much from the beginning. I couldn’t find my credit card so it seemed like the perfect time to try out Bank of America’s “Safe Shop” service, which generates a one-time use credit card number so you can make “safe” purchases online and not have to worry about anyone stealing either you card number or identity.

Sounds great, right? The big problem there is that when you show up at a Best Buy in Florida and give them your credit card (an apparently MANDATORY part of the process) the number wont match. Furthermore, it turns out that arguing with successively more important employees (up to the corporate level) for an hour and a half wont help. Also, opening your computer, going to the Bank of America website and SHOWING them the “electronic credit card” (WITH MATCHING NUMBERS!) wont work. Instead you’ll just get progressively more frustrated as you stare at the video camera you’re dying to try out that is less than four feet from you and yet, forever out of reach.

Finally, in a fit of impotent frustration I decided that it was a lost cause and I was willing to do whatever it took to get the camera. The only option? Cancel that transaction and repurchase the camera in store. BUT, you know what happens when you cancel a sizable purchase? The authorization stays on your card thereby using up enough available credit to prevent you from running through a second, equally sizable, purchase!

The most mysterious/so-frustrating-I-wanted-to-gouge-out-a-complete-stranger’s-eyes part? If I wanted to ship it to my home I wouldn’t have even had to SHOW my card. But I wasn’t in California. I was in Florida. And jumping on a cruise ship the next day.

I hate Best Buy.

I’m done.

Brett.

Hey Team,

You know who’s amazing? James Randi. Now that I think about it, I suppose that’s why he’s called The Amazing Randi. Huh. Go figure. If you don’t know who I’m talking about then let me give you a couple broad strokes. Randi is a retired performer who used to be a magician and a mentalist and currently heads the James Randi Educational Foundation. You may have heard of his Million Dollar Challenge, which offers a prize to anyone who can prove under scientific rigor that they have some type of extra-sensory perception. All you have to do is be able to say what it is you can do and under what laboratory conditions you can perform said talent. It’s been available for decades now. Guess how much the foundation has given away in the name of the challenge. That’s right. Zero.

Pretty awesome right? It’s great to know that someone is out there trying to prove that “real” psychics are more often than not, ridiculous amoral performers preying on people who miss their dead relatives deeply. In short, James Randi is one of my personal heroes.

And…I got to meet him at dinner the other night! It was a pre-Carl Sagan Day dinner in South Florida filled with skeptics and snapping dressers. (I was wearing a t-shirt. I probably should have been at the kid’s table.) My childhood hero was looking a little haggard but still impressively spry and hip considering not only his advanced age but also the fact that he is neck deep in a radiation battle with colon cancer.

I sat about eleven people away from him on an ‘L’ shaped tabled and spent most of dinner either talking to a painfully pompous guy next to me or candidly watching Randi’s every move. Finally, dinner ended and the time for the group to mingle was upon us.

I met a few very cool people (whose names escape me right now but I none the less enjoyed my conversations with) until finally I had made my way around to the man of the hour. Justin, the friend who took me to the dinner (and editor weirdthings.com) had worked with Randi recently on a couple of projects, so he made the introductions.

Up close Randi looked even more fragile, but considering the amount of respect and reverence I was carrying with me he might as well of been ten feet tall and dressed like the Beast Master, primed and ready to kick the collective asses of any people that dare insult his ferrets. Our lengthy discussion went a little something like this.

Justin: “Hi, Randi. This is my friend Brett. He spent two years traveling around America crossing crazy things off of a fifty item life list.”

Brett: “Hello!”

Randi: “Oh! Look, they have food over there.”

(That’s what he said as he walked away…)

I’m done.

Brett.