Cruise: Reunions : All Aboard : Three generations create family memories on a Caribbean cruise

Short of achieving world peace and finding 12 jurors who’ve never heard of O.J. Simpson, there are few things tougher than getting all your loved ones in the same place at the same time. If the in-laws can make it, the grandchildren have T-ball, or somebody’s working or not up to the drive.

For three generations of my husband’s family, the solution this summer was combining a family gathering with a Caribbean cruise.

This was a special gathering, not only a get-together but a reprise of one of our favorite memories. Two years before, my husband’s father and stepmother had celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary by taking everyone on a Mexican cruise, figuring that for the price of a big party, they could have a week’s worth of family fun.

Almost from the moment we got home that year, we were looking for excuses to do the whole thing again. Finally, last summer, the grandparents announced they were ready for a sequel. This time, the only theme was their desire to bring everyone together again--kids, grand-kids, step-kids, in-laws, the whole kit and caboodle.

Little did we know we were sailing on the cutting edge: Reunion and other extended-family cruises, travel agents say, are one of the fastest growing segments of the industry, encompassing everything from modest group vacations such as ours, to a recent, nationally publicized $250,000 confab in which 300 members of a Miami-based family took a weekend hop to Nassau and back.

The main advantage of a cruise, we discovered, is that you can really concentrate on quality time. Because cruises are all-inclusive, no one needs to worry about where you’ll be eating, who’ll clean up, whether you should all go out afterward, or if the kids will be bored. Accommodations, food, entertainment, youth activities, baby-sitting, even special cocktail parties are all either automatically included, or a quick phone call away.

The biggest downside for most families is sticker shock: Fares for our 13-member group amounted to about $1,800 per person, or about $7,200 for a family of four. But the price covered the flight to and from Los Angeles, overnight accommodations in Miami, seven days of first-class meals and lodging, and transportation to explorations in the Yucatan Peninsula, Jamaica and Grand Cayman.

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Our group was made up of four households: my husband’s parents, Gordon and Esther Magnuson; his brother and sister-in-law, Michael Magnuson and Heather Conwell, and their two teen-agers, Molly and Matt; his stepsister Kathy Dunham and her two teen-agers, Brian and Marnie; and our family--my husband, Bob Magnuson, me and our daughters, 11-year-old Alex and 2 1/2-year-old Gina. We’re an easygoing group, but when it comes to leisure activities, we can be a tricky crowd. Some are morning people, some are night owls. Some like to splurge, others are frugal. Some have time and energy and independence to burn, some have lap babies and bad backs.

Despite the challenge, however, the trip ended up offering something for everyone. Alone, there were some among us who would have never given a second thought to a cruise, but as a consensus choice, it was just right.

The trip began with what turned out to be its only uncomfortable leg--the long cross-country flight. By the time we arrived in Miami, where our ship was docked, we were almost too fatigued to have fun. In fact, the grandparents did opt for a quiet evening in our hotel. But it was one of those hot, velvety Miami nights that can be tough to resist. There was the smell of saltwater and disinfectant on the sidewalk, of tropical flowers and incense burning somewhere, and so the rest of us rallied in time for dinner.

The teens and preteens, who were given permission to venture forth as a group, gave top marks to the Bayside Marketplace, a waterfront mall that featured an especially hard-rocking Hard Rock Cafe. Meanwhile, the adults and baby Gina dined in Little Havana, enjoying fried bananas, black beans, and pork chops with lime and onions.

On Sunday afternoon, transported and refreshed, we boarded our ship, Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas, and then split up happily into our respective staterooms: One for the grandparents, three more for the parents in each household, a fourth for the three adolescent granddaughters and a fifth for the two grandsons (the baby bunked in a triple berth with us.)

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It was an arrangement that particularly pleased the kids, who spent a lot of time staying up late, ordering room service and sleeping until noon or so in their fold-down bunk beds. It was also a break for parents: Thanks to the ship’s extensive youth programs, the kids pretty much disappeared into their own world, a social circuit that began with a series of cruise-sponsored mixers for teens and pre-teens and lasted past midnight as international cliques of adolescents congregated awkwardly on the main decks.

Meanwhile, the adults fell into their own routines--lounging at the ship’s pools and hot tubs, listening to jazz and reggae in the lounges, gambling in the casino, playing bingo or just resting in the staterooms in front of one of several movie channels. (Our ship’s selection included “The Pelican Brief” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”)

Even the baby had fun, watching for dolphins from our porthole, splashing in the baby pool and visiting the big kids in their rooms down the hall. Unlike some lines, however, Royal Caribbean had little to offer her in the way of organized activities--their children’s program starts at age 5. They did offer baby-sitting for $3 a child until 1 a.m., but my husband and I were usually too sleepy to take advantage of it.

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Most evenings, we’d gather for pre-dinner cocktails in the grandparents’ stateroom. Several of us had brought our own liquor and munchies to save on the bar bills, but we did splurge on a couple of evenings by meeting on the top deck in a circular lounge that offered spectacular views.

Then it was down to dinner which--as is so often the case on cruises--was routinely excellent. We filled two previously reserved, adjacent tables, one for the grown-ups, another for the kids, and stuffed ourselves nightly on cold soups and filet mignon, crab-meat cannelloni, duck with blueberry sauce and other gourmet entrees.

For Gina, there was a children’s menu featuring pizza and chicken nuggets, and plenty of diversion. One night, the waiters and busboys serenaded us with an off-key rendition of “O Sole Mio”; another evening, they marched in a conga line balancing our dessert, a kind of sponge cake the chef had dubbed “Flaming Babalu,” on their heads. In their free moments, our waiter, a young Turkish man named Kadir, and his assistant, a Thai busboy named Mickey, wowed the kids’ table with jokes and napkin-folding tricks.

This, we discovered, is one of the nicer things about cruising--the high level of personal interaction with the staff. Our ship carried some 2,500 people in a vessel the size of a 14-story hotel, and yet we came to know everyone from the people who made our beds in the morning to those who poured our wine at night.

Also nice was the range of activity. There were, in addition to the amenities already mentioned, a health club, all-day exercise classes, a Western dance seminar, teen discos that our kids found passably cool, several lounges, a duty-free shopping mezzanine, battalions of studio photographers, casinos, an extensive library, wine tastings, skeet shooting, karaoke and entertainment every night.

But the biggest diversion came on Day Two, when current events overtook us, and our ship took on three boatloads of Cuban refugees--one in the morning, one at midday and a third in the late afternoon.

At each announcement, throngs of passengers crowded the decks, snapping pictures and juggling video cameras, particularly when the second raft, carrying 30 people, showed up in the middle of lunch. Far below us, on the dark-blue water, the castaways gazed up from their little platform of bobbing tires and rotten boards. Someone threw them a rope, and they were brought on board and hustled off to a lower deck. Later that night, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter arrived to pick them up, 51 refugees in all.

The next three days were taken up with port excursions, for which we had to sign up in advance. Most cruise lines offer a variety of day trips, but they charge extra for them. We managed to save hundreds of dollars--and have just as much fun--by organizing most of our excursions ourselves.

The main exceptions were the grandparents, who sensibly opted, for example, for a $33-a-person tour of steaming-hot Cozumel in an air-conditioned bus, and my husband’s brother and sister-in-law, who paid $60 apiece for an instructive tour of the Mayan ruins in the Mexican jungle city of Tulum.

Taking our gaggle of kids on such a tour, however, seemed too arduous, so we struck out on our own. On Cozumel, Bob, his stepsister Kathy and I rented mopeds for ourselves and the kids and toured the tropical island, stopping at one beach to snorkel, at another for drinks under a straw palapa , and at a third for a quick lunch of tacos and Cokes (sold at the not-all-that-reasonable tourist price of $2 a bottle).

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In Georgetown, Grand Cayman (the palm-studded scene of some memorable scamming in John Grisham’s best-selling “The Firm”), we snorkeled and shopped. Smugly, we noticed that the blue waters we ended up exploring for free were the same ones that later served as the site of the ship’s $26-per-person snorkeling tour. We also gave ourselves a pat on the back for bringing along our own fins and masks, since rentals tended to add up.

In Ocho Rios, Jamaica, we all likewise avoided the ship’s excursions, and hired a guide at the dock who charged us $15 each for an all-day tour that the ship had priced at $23 per person for just four hours. In the capable care of our driver Audley Nugent and “Milo,” his minibus, we made the rigorous 600-foot climb up the cascading Dunn’s River Falls, hit gift shops and roadside artisan stands, hiked around a rain-forest, sampled bags of sweet, fresh pineapple from an outdoor market and dined on jerk chicken and curried goat at the al fresco Double V Restaurant.

Then it was back to sea for a day and a half, where the kids by now had developed a gang of new pals (and a fascination for a teen-aged British model who happened to be a shipmate and whom our nephews had privately dubbed “Euro-babe”). Our final excursion was spent lolling on a Royal Caribbean-owned beach on an island called CocoCay, which the cruise line had outfitted with bars, cabanas, barbecues and beach chairs.

On one of our last nights, my husband went up to the deck with his brother and father; by starlight, they talked quietly over Jamaican cigars. My father-in-law is by trade a civil engineer, but on that soft evening, surrounded by family, he was a poet who recited Carl Sandburg to his grown sons.

My husband later said, with characteristic restraint, how good it felt to see his dad so relaxed. But you never know what kind of discoveries--and rediscoveries--await when you set sail with the people you love.