Frank
# Seven Cruises In, and I Still Have to Relearn How to Stop Every Single Time
1. The first day at sea is always a little bit miserable.
Not because of the ship. Royal Caribbean does what it does, and they do it well. The misery is internal. There’s this low-grade hum of anxiety that kicks in around hour three of day one, right about the time you realize you have no meetings to prepare for, no tickets to close, no Exchange queues to check. Your hands don’t know what to do. You keep reaching for your phone. You’re not even looking for anything specific. It’s reflex. Muscle memory built from 28 years of always being the guy who fixes something.
I’ve been on seven of these cruises now, and that first-day friction has shown up on every single one.
2. “Disconnecting” is not a switch. It’s closer to physical therapy.
People talk about unplugging like it’s an action you take once. Like you put the phone down and suddenly you’re present and zen and staring peacefully at the Atlantic. That’s not how it works, at least not for me.
It’s more like stretching a muscle that’s been locked up. Day one is uncomfortable. Day two starts to ease. By day three, something shifts. You stop counting the hours until you can check email and start actually noticing where you are. The food tastes better. You hear conversations instead of just being adjacent to them.
That progression is real, but it takes the full three days to get there. If your cruise is only four days, congratulations, you spent 75% of it in transition.
3. The ship Wi-Fi is a trap, and I have walked into it willingly, multiple times.
Royal Caribbean sells Wi-Fi packages. They’re not cheap, and they’re not fast. The first couple of cruises, I bought them. Told myself I just needed to stay loosely available. Needed to check in.
What actually happened: I spent money to make myself anxious at sea instead of anxious on land. I’d get half-loaded pages, partially-sent emails, and just enough connectivity to remind me of everything I wasn’t doing. It’s the worst of both worlds. You’re not really there, and you’re not really available either. You’re just paying for the illusion of control.
The last few cruises, no package. Done. Kimberly backed that call completely, and she was right to.
4. Watching other people refuse to stop is genuinely unsettling once you notice it.
You see it everywhere on these ships. Families at dinner with four people looking at four different screens. Guys standing at the rail with a phone in front of the ocean, recording it instead of seeing it. Not judging, I’ve been that guy. But once you’ve made a few laps around this particular lesson, it starts to look different from the outside.
There’s a specific kind of person I’ve spotted across multiple cruises: the one who is visibly, actively suffering through every non-productive moment. You can see it. They’re physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely, waiting for a signal, waiting for a reason to engage, waiting for permission to relax that never comes.
I recognized that person because I was him for longer than I want to admit.
The Part Nobody Warned Me About
5. Rest makes the work worse before it makes it better.
This one took me a while to name. Coming back from the first couple of cruises, the first two or three days back at the keyboard felt slow and clunky. I attributed it to being out of the loop, having to catch up. But it kept happening, cruise after cruise, even when I’d done a decent job of keeping up with critical items before I left.
What was actually happening: I had genuinely rested. And rested brains don’t just snap back to full throttle immediately. There’s a re-entry period. It’s uncomfortable in the same way day one at sea is uncomfortable, just in reverse.
The mistake was reading that discomfort as evidence that the vacation had cost me something. It hadn’t. Within a week, the clarity from actually having stopped was paying dividends. I was solving problems faster, making better calls, writing better documentation. The deficit was temporary. The gains were not.
I work best under deadlines I pretended didn’t exist until 20 minutes ago, so coasting back in slowly felt wrong. But it was right.
6. The people you’re with notice whether you’re actually there.
This one’s harder to write.
Kimberly and I have been on most of these cruises together. The kids have come on a few. These trips are where family time actually happens, not holiday gatherings that last a few hours, but consecutive days in the same space, same meals, same shore excursions. It’s concentrated.
And there is a version of a cruise where you’re physically present for all of it and emotionally somewhere else, and your family can tell. They don’t always say it. But they can tell.
The cruises where I actually managed to let go, the ones where I didn’t buy the Wi-Fi package and didn’t spend dinner half-checked-out, those are the trips we still talk about. The others kind of blur together.
7. After seven cruises, I still don’t have this fully figured out. That’s the point.
If I’d cracked the code on disconnecting by cruise three, there’d be nothing left to write. The fact that I still feel that first-day pull, still have to consciously put the phone down, still have to talk myself through the re-entry period afterward, means this isn’t a skill you master and file away. It’s something you practice.
Which is annoying. I’m an IT veteran. I like solved problems. I like documented solutions. “Keep practicing something you’ll never fully automate” is not the kind of answer I prefer.
But it’s the honest one.
8. A cruise is not a reward for working hard. It’s a reminder that you are not your job.
That framing took me until probably cruise five to land on, and it changed how I think about these trips entirely.
The ship doesn’t care what your title is. The ocean has absolutely no opinion about your Exchange environment or your Active Directory forest or any of it. You get on that boat and you are just a person, full stop, with no particular expertise that matters in the current context.
For someone who’s built a professional identity on being the guy who keeps things running, that is either terrifying or liberating depending on how well cruise day three is going.
Most days, by the time we hit the first port, it’s liberating.
That’s why we keep booking them. Not for the buffet, not for the excursions, though both are fine. Because every once in a while, it’s useful to remember who you are when you strip away everything you do.
Mediterranean trip is being planned. We’ll see if I’ve actually learned anything by then.
