Books, Arts & Manners: Love Boats

A GROUP of European friends recently suggested we all sail to Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics, and because of my Greek shipping connection, I was appointed tour director and Führer for all things maritime. Mind you, it is not as easy as it sounded. As everyone who has ever been sardined into a jet knows, the only way nowadays to cross the pond between the Old and New Worlds is by air, or in the manner of NR’s editor-at-large, by private sailboat.

Although the latter is still a possibility, my friends are as useful as the bottom half of a mermaid when it comes to roughing it, so for the moment I’m looking around for a miracle in the form of a luxury liner steaming from England, Germany, Italy, or France to the eastern shore of the United States, sometime in the summer of 1996. There is always the QEII, of course, but as Führer, I wouldn’t recommend her. The last time I sailed her across the Atlantic, there was REOT written all over her. The acronym stands for Radical Egalitarianism of Today, despite the fact that this was twenty years ago, in April 1974, to be exact. Worse, it was also modern, all plastic, glass, and steel, without the wasted space that gave the old boats their luxurious aura.

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A GROUP of European friends recently suggested we all sail to Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics, and because of my Greek shipping connection, I was appointed tour director and Führer for all things maritime. Mind you, it is not as easy as it sounded. As everyone who has ever been sardined into a jet knows, the only way nowadays to cross the pond between the Old and New Worlds is by air, or in the manner of NR’s editor-at-large, by private sailboat.

Although the latter is still a possibility, my friends are as useful as the bottom half of a mermaid when it comes to roughing it, so for the moment I’m looking around for a miracle in the form of a luxury liner steaming from England, Germany, Italy, or France to the eastern shore of the United States, sometime in the summer of 1996. There is always the QEII, of course, but as Führer, I wouldn’t recommend her. The last time I sailed her across the Atlantic, there was REOT written all over her. The acronym stands for Radical Egalitarianism of Today, despite the fact that this was twenty years ago, in April 1974, to be exact. Worse, it was also modern, all plastic, glass, and steel, without the wasted space that gave the old boats their luxurious aura.