For those who are not aware, I have spent a majority of the past four and a half years being voluntarily homeless and living out of hotel rooms while traveling full-time. There was a period of one year in the middle of that where I rented a condo in Las Vegas again, but apart from that, I have been living a fully nomadic lifestyle. It is probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself, and constantly exposing myself to new places and environments has been a very good learning experience.

The fact that I fully committed to living in temporary lodging means that I don’t have rent to pay on an apartment, which makes the financials of non-stop, back-to-back travel a lot more manageable. However, this does mean that I don’t have a home where I “go back to” in between trips, so I usually look for places where I can stay for more than a week at a time so that I don’t have to move around as frequently. One option I had previously looked into as an extended stay solution was a cruise ship.

Going on a quick tangent… I get motion sick very easily. It is difficult for me to ride in friends’ vehicles because I get very easily carsick if I’m not in a larger truck or SUV and deeply reclined back. When I fly, I book domestic first class and long-haul lie-flat business class seats not because I am uncontrollably drowning in money, but because I get airsick if I’m not in a seat that can recline far back, and sitting upright in a standard economy seat causes me to feel unwell and lose a day or two of my trip to recovering from travel. As for watercraft, I cannot ride small boats at all, or else I will get severely seasick within the first five minutes.

However, similar to how I can be mostly okay in large trucks and SUVs, I’ve noticed that I am somewhat okay on large ships as well. I’ve ridden the ferry across Puget Sound a handful of times before in Washington, and I felt generally fine during that. I figured that, considering the very large size of cruise ships and the latest stabilization technology, there is a decent chance I will be fine on a cruise ship as well.

The nice thing about cruise ships is that they act not only as an entertainment experience, but also as a hotel room for the duration of the itinerary. I figured that this would be a relatively cost-effective lodging option, so I added a cruise to the list of things I wanted to eventually try out. Afterwards, if I was able to confirm that I did not get severe seasickness on a cruise ship, I could consider doing a multi-week cruise (or back-to-back shorter cruises) and call a ship my home for a little bit as part of my nomadic adventure.

 
A few days ago, I was in Los Angeles County visiting some friends when I noticed that Royal Caribbean had a cruise to Mexico departing from the World Cruise Center at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California, on sale for a decently discounted rate. The timing of this cruise lined up pretty well with my schedule and slotted in during a free week I had, so I decided to buy myself an impromptu ticket and figure out once and for all whether I will get seasick, or if living on a cruise ship is a viable strategy for my future.

The day before the cruise was scheduled to depart, I relocated from northern Los Angeles County to southern Los Angeles County. I spent a night at the Marriott Long Beach Downtown so I could be a quick 15-minute ride away from the terminal and wouldn’t have to sit in an hour and a half of traffic the morning of my cruise. My company Tempo’s former office was in Long Beach, so it was a little bit nostalgic being back in town and seeing the city again.

I wanted something simple, straightforward, and reliable for my hotel before my cruise, so I opted for a regular Marriott instead of a resort or anything fancier. I also wanted a property that had an M Club executive lounge so I could get free snacks and soft drinks throughout the day, and regular Marriotts have the most consistency in having lounges available.

Unfortunately, I found out after arrival that this is a property with a mandatory US$34.80 destination fee. Out of that destination fee, US$25.00 of it is returned back to you as a food and beverage credit at their on-site restaurant, Local Current. Along with the additive US$10.00 food and beverage credit from my Ambassador Elite welcome gift, I managed to grab an almost-free dinner entrée to go along with my free hors d’oeuvres, snacks, and beverages from the lounge.

The following morning, I woke up much earlier than usual because I needed to make it to the cruise terminal no later than 11:30 AM PST. (Lately, I’ve been functioning on an Asian time zone schedule even while in the United States, so I end up going to sleep very late and waking up after noon.) After a quick shower, I drove west on Interstate 710, also known as the Seaside Freeway, across the very scenic Port of Long Beach and Terminal Island. Upon arrival, I discovered that the Los Angeles World Cruise Center was temporarily suffering from a power outage.

Nobody was able to board because Royal Caribbean’s systems were down, so we had to wait until power was restored. Fortunately, because I upgraded myself to The Key program, I was eligible to wait in the sheltered VIP line with other priority members. Once the power was working again, the line moved very quickly, and we were the first ones on board.

The first thing I did was get my safety briefing out of the way. I had to read some safety information and watch a few quick videos, then check in with a staff member at my muster so I would know where to go in case of emergency. Once that was all sorted, I headed down into the VIP dining area for my special welcome lunch that came as part of The Key upgrade.

I was one of the first people in the VIP restaurant, presumably because I went straight to the restaurant after the safety briefing without first exploring the rest of the ship. This meant that I got a prime windowside table with a nice view of the port.

My waitress brought over some onion bread and pretzel bread for me to munch on while I was reviewing the menu and picking out my courses.

For my appetizer, I went with some jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce.

For my main entrée, I ordered some salmon. This picture makes it look very sad and disappointing and colorless, but believe it or not, it was actually unexpectedly quite delicious. I also particularly liked the texture of the salmon skin—it was a great combination of crispy and chewy such that I was able to cut through it with my knife, but it maintained its form enough while I was chewing it to add a deeper textural element to each bite.

To conclude my meal, I got two scoops of strawberry ice cream. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this; it was just simple and decently good ice cream.

I finished lunch just in time for all the staterooms to be ready. I headed out of the restaurant and up to Deck 6 to check out my ocean-view balcony room in which I’d be spending the next week.

It was both larger and smaller than I expected. I understand that cruise ships have limited space and the rooms tend to be small, but I found the “living room” area to be fairly spacious. On the other hand, I found the bathroom to be microscopically and borderline unusably small.

It would be nice if they took several square feet out of the living area and put it into the bathroom instead. To put things into perspective, the bathroom was so small that taking three steps means you already walk straight out of the bathroom. Every time I showered, I left the door open because the space was so small that I assumed the accumulating steam from the hot water would make it so humid that I would suffocate and drown from breathing in too much water if I closed the door.

After unpacking, setting up my laptop, and getting a little bit of time-sensitive work done, I left my stateroom and started walking around the ship to get a better idea of what the layout was and where I would need to be to see the most interesting things. I eventually made it to what I personally thought was the most interesting part of the ship, which is the open deck on Deck 15. This floor had a running track, so I did a few laps around and took some photographs while walking.

At 4 PM PST, we left the berth for an on-time departure. I watched and enjoyed the music from the sail-away party for a little bit, but from the upper open deck so I wouldn’t have to be so close to the smelly pools and partially-naked people.

One of the big perks of having a balcony room is that you have a view of the ocean, so as we were getting further away from San Pedro, I returned to my stateroom to have my own private, quiet, peaceful, solo sail-away party. I watched the waves as the land slowly shrank into the horizon.

It wasn’t long until I started getting a mild headache. The seasickness wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what it is on smaller boats, because I usually feel like vomiting within about five minutes of riding on smaller watercraft. However, I could definitely feel seasickness slowly setting in, and I was progressively feeling worse and worse.

As I mentioned before, my solution to motion sickness on cars and planes is usually either reclining back or laying down. Lucky for me, my room has an entire bed in it, so in order to combat the seasickness, I changed into my pajamas and laid down in bed with my laptop to get some more work done. It helped a little bit, but as we sailed deeper into the Pacific Ocean and the waters got rougher, nothing seemed to help. I got extremely dizzy and felt very unwell.

I put away my laptop and started watching YouTube on my phone before getting even more sick. Wondering if looking at screens was causing this, I put away my phone too and took a nap. I woke up after a few hours and felt just as bad as I did when I had first fallen asleep. It was late at night and the specialty dining restaurants were about to close soon, so I forced myself out of bed and went to Izumi Sushi for dinner, in case getting some calories in my body would help make me feel better.

It didn’t.

Izumi’s sushi was pretty bad. I don’t know if I just have unrealistically high standards for sushi, or if it tasted worse because I was feeling sick, but the food quality was pretty bad, especially considering that this was a specialty dining venue where you have to pay an upcharge if you didn’t pre-order a special premium dining package like I did.

Their shrimp spring roll wasn’t a spring roll at all, but instead, was basically like one of those heavily-processed fried snacks that you would find in the frozen foods section of the grocery store (and to make things worse, it was also loaded with cream cheese that smelled like mold). The poke bowl had about ten small cubes of akami tuna, and was ~70% rice. The salmon and yellowtail nigiri that came as part of the chef’s sushi selection was cut very thin and had a unpleasantly fishy taste. The texture of the fish made me suspect that it was not flash frozen properly, because it was sort of mushy. I asked for assorted mochi ice cream for dessert, but instead was served a single scoop of regular green tea ice cream.

I love sushi, so prior to embarking on the ship, I had already put in a bunch of reservations for meals at Izumi Sushi. This dinner was so disappointing to me that, after getting back to my stateroom, I literally canceled every single future reservation at Izumi and replaced it with other specialty dining venues available on the ship. I heard that ginger was good for combating seasickness though, so before leaving, I finished eating all the ginger that came with the sushi.

I made it back to my stateroom without vomiting from seasickness. I changed back into my pajamas, climbed back into bed, and took another nap.

After another few hours, I woke up shortly after midnight. Miraculously, even though I still had a headache and still felt somewhat unwell, I was surprisingly feeling better than I did after dinner. I got up, washed my face, brushed my teeth, stretched for a bit, and replied to some emails and messages. After confirming that my condition had stabilized, I headed out into the cruise ship to do some exploring.

Going for a walk seems to have helped as well. When I’m just sitting inside my stateroom, it seems like my brain is incredibly confused as to why it senses motion, and then triggers an emergency alert to let me know that something is horribly wrong. However, if I’m walking around, it seems like my brain attributes the ship’s motion to assuming that my legs are just roleplaying as a crippled man who doesn’t know how to walk, and it doesn’t send panic signals anymore.

Because it was so late, almost everyone had gone to sleep already and the ship was nearly empty apart from the maintenance crew cleaning.

I started my walk on Deck 3 in the casino.

I then went up to Deck 4 into the two-story Music Hall and looked down on the stage.

Outside the Music Hall was the Royal Esplanade.

I ascended the stairs from the Royal Esplanade to Deck 5 and checked out some of the art installations.

I proceeded further to the aft of Deck 5 to check out the café and art gallery.

At the far end of Deck 5 was Two70, an entertainment venue.

Upstairs on Deck 6 above Two70 was the library.

Back down on Deck 5 near the stairs up to my stateroom was the Schooner Bar.

This ship also has the Bionic Bar, two robotic arms that take your drink order and prepare it for you using the vast collection of alcohol bottles hanging from the ceiling.

I guess even Royal Caribbean isn’t immune from those pesky Activate Windows alerts.

Many of the floors above this only had mostly staterooms, until I got to the upper-most floors. I tried taking the elevator, but that vertical motion mixed in with the side-to-side roll of the ship nearly sent my brain back into panic mode, so I stuck with the stairs for the rest of my walk.

From Deck 15, I peered down into the indoor pool and pool bar.

After getting the rest of my steps in for the day, I went back into my stateroom, transferred the photographs I took into my laptop, and started blogging.

… And now we’re here.

I’m honestly not sure how this cruise is going to go. Hopefully I continue to get better and the rest of the trip is fine, but I am also somewhat prepared to just be bedridden from seasickness for the rest of the week-long cruise and then never step foot on another ship ever again. After doing some brief research online, I found out that Guest Services will often supply passengers with complementary motion sickness medication, so if things are still bad tomorrow, I will go claim some Meclizine and hope that I’m not already vomiting so much that I can’t keep it down.

I browsed through the Royal Caribbean app and it seems like there are a lot of things to do on the cruise ship, and along with the unlimited premium dining package I have that allows me to check out all the specialty restaurants, I will likely have a packed schedule for the next week (either packed with activities, or packed with laying in bed trying not to throw up).

Because of the limited time I have on the ship, I plan on finishing the rest of my cruise blog posts after-the-fact rather than in realtime, so I’ll be back to give another cruise update in about a week or so, after I’m back on solid land. Until then, you can go make a bet on your favorite new prediction market website to gamble on how many times I vomit or something, I guess.