Eschewing Lotus and Misery on a Boat with Sue Barker

No self-respecting writer would invite unfavorable comparisons with David Foster Wallace by writing on ocean cruises.¹ And no sane tennis writer would invite further comparisons by writing about tennis² and cruising IN THE SAME PIECE.

However that’s exactly what’s happening here. The Seabourn Venture—a 564-foot, 132-suite ship—was going to Monaco for the Monte Carlo Masters, and I was on it. This is not literary criticism of Wallace and Gary Shteyngart,³ because even I am not that audacious, but it is criticism of them both: Those two knuckleheads spent a lot of money and their precious time on deeply misguided voyages to unhappiness. They knew what they were doing; they chose the kinds of trips and vessels that would bring the worst out in people—including themselves. Wallace was at least somewhat thrifty; in 1997, he took a $3,000,⁴ seven-night Caribbean cruise on Celebrity’s MV Zenith for Harper’s. Secretly renaming it the MV Nadir—which I would have done too, to be fair—he proceeded to wallow in an existential crisis brought on, in some part, by stubbornly remaining on the 1,800-passenger boat for the entire week.

1. Wallace (Foster Wallace?) famously wrote the definitive piece on cruising. I’m not going to tell you how to find it because this is humiliating enough as it is.
2. Wallace also wrote incandescently about tennis.
3. Shteyngart took up the mantle last year, writing a treatise on the abject misery of cruising with 5,000 of his fellow humans. You should definitely not look that one up either.
4. Roughly $6,000 in today’s dollars. Could be worse.

The Epicurean approach to life involves avoiding pain and seeking pleasure as the thing that makes everything else endurable; I am right there with Epicurus. But Stoics Wallace, Shteyngart, and other gluttons for punishment grit their teeth and take the bad and the good in equal measure as part of a philosophy that instructs one to embrace unpleasantness as part of the deal. Knowingly Stoic or not, by plumbing the depths of debauchery and crowdthink and slovenliness and their own wretchedness on mere luxury cruises,⁵ they wasted a perfectly good opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of traveling the way we all used to: by ship.

I’ll admit that I didn’t begin with a higher opinion of cruising than they did. In fact, I thought cruising was for masses of which I did not seek to be a part. But there’s a big difference between my mild reluctance and their masochistic courting-dance with utter despair. So when the Seabourn invitation arrived, and I surveyed the hitherto unimagined delights of “ultra-luxury” cruising, I came around and fully intended to enjoy the voyage.

We left Barcelona on an afternoon in April—six days before the round of 16 in Monaco—anchoring or docking every morning in another beautiful town on the French Riviera. British tennis legend and UK national treasure Sue Barker was coming along, to add cred to this maiden tennis sailing, and to give evening presentations to a boatload of tennis fans.

The Venture is small as cruise ships go, with only eight passenger decks (seven, if you don’t include the deck with the tender platform, where the ship’s orange shuttle/life boats pick up passengers and drop them off when the ship has to anchor off shore).⁶ To start with, it’s painted a dark green on the bottom, so it’s already setting expectations. As it’s roughly the size of an oligarch’s mega-yacht, you get the impression that you could be cruising the Med with about 300 lucky hangers-on, but without the fear of impound by international authorities.

Three hundred hangers-on—or in this case paying passengers—is, to me, the perfect number. Not that I’d know any better, never having cruised before ascending the gang plank for Seabourn’s “Mediterranean Marvels & Matches: Monte Carlo Masters” sailing. But more people means more people, and that was a problem for DFW and Shteyngart.⁷ I suspect it would be a problem for me, too.

In fact, the only thing that gave me pause about this cruise was a fear of passivity. I hate an inactive vacation; my last and only trip via this mode of transit was sedentary and so bad. I’d rented a small boat for my husband’s birthday, as part of something called a “Cruise and Learn.” Our captain—Diane—had agreed to leave us alone mid-trip as long as she deemed us competent to operate the boat. You’ll be shocked to hear that Cap’n Diane found us conveniently wanting, and remained aboard for the entire week, forcing us to answer her gleeful “what’s for breakfast?” every morning, as we spent whole days motoring between destinations, pulling up at sunset to another waterborne RV park, surrounded by shiftless boaters with oxygen tanks and barbecues.

While the Venture was big enough for plenty of activity on board, I still feared succumbing to the Lotus-Eater Effect: Being lulled into lethargy, like those poor addled souls in the Odyssey, by the soporific comfort of a slow trip along the Mediterranean coast, the pesky annoyances of travel removed, all sun and cobblestones and pastries and French. I needed to build in extra-nautical exercise; Dave-o and The Garster had failed to do so at their peril.^8,9

As this was a tennis cruise, I decided on tennis and—since we were sailing through the spiritual home of the sport—padel. I looked at the itinerary, and mapped out clubs at every...stop? Port? Whatever.

On the day before I boarded the boat, I took a group padel lesson at Barcelona’s Club Esportiù Laieta. Padel is played in an open-topped glass box, a little like a squash court but carpeted, and with a net in the middle. Paddles are thick and quite heavy, with holes in the face to allow for airflow and to reduce the weight a little. The balls are like red-dot tennis balls; they have give, and there’s a satisfying “thwack” when you hit them. As long as the ball hits the ground before it hits the wall, it’s good, so you can hit that ball as hard as you want. After a remedial explanation of the basics, we began to play. Instructor Juanma quickly identified what I’d hoped would disappear behind a pretty hefty language barrier: my tendency to add a windshield-wiper motion to the end of every forehand, no matter the racquet sport. Regardless, for €22 I was now equipped with a rudimentary understanding of padel and the Spanish words for windshield wiper. I was ready for the lessons that awaited me.

On the day of departure, Seabourn sent a car. I expanded into the spacious SUV for the 20-minute drive to the dock, and wondered why travel by boat feels less chic than it used to, back when the word “posh” was coined.¹⁰

5. There are levels of opulence. A “luxury cruise” is mostly on giant ships with thousands of people. An “ultra-luxury cruise” is smaller, better-appointed, with ports-of-call that luxury cruises couldn’t possibly shoehorn themselves into.
6. I’m going to warn you right now: I will misuse and mishandle cruising terminology throughout this piece and I will not apologize. Seasoned cruisers will roll their eyes but I swear to god I heard the captain describe our vessel, over the loudspeaker, as a boat. This is unthinkable among the yachteratiTM, I guess.
7. The enormity of it all had Gary crying himself to sleep, and Big D wishing for death.
8. I’m beginning to wonder if they didn’t seek it out. The peril, that is.
9. It should be noted that Shteyngart has since seen reason. A recent New York Times article documents his new embrace of the good life; welcome, Gary.
10. Port-Out, Starboard Home referred to the cooler, more costly shaded rooms on the left side of an ocean liner as it left Britain for the Far East, and on the right side as it returned.

There are still tiers of acceptability, of course: When a ship is going somewhere, like a Cunard liner crossing the Atlantic or an Egyptian dahabiya sailing down the Nile, we tend to imbue it with some of the glamor of a bygone era. But when it’s just a joyride, to and from a common port full of enormous amusement parks afloat? Well, then they’re fair game and we love to hate them: unseemly floating buffets wherein the inhabitants don’t have to leave the boat, and if they do, they’re herded around to the same basic tourist attractions in big buses that disgorge their contents at the closest entrance to whatever unfortunate city is forced to enact laws against eating on sidewalks.¹¹

My luggage and I made it to cabin (stateroom?) 617. My two nights in a terrace suite at the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona meant the accommodations would have a lot to live up to. They did: Every suite on the Venture has an outside veranda, a sitting area, a sumptuous bed, a marble bathroom with a bath and a shower as if we weren’t on a boat—er, ship—and a bar with drinks and fruit and champagne and little Thomas Keller chocolates.¹²

Within a minute and a half it was clear to me that this mode of travel is gravely unsung among discerning travelers. Imagine flying in first class, with all the amenities you might expect, but the plane moves very slowly, only at night, with rhythmic turbulence that rocks you gently to sleep, and you arrive refreshed in another lovely little town every day, leaving your belongings on the plane for safe-keeping. Try doing that for eight days without emptying your bank account. You can’t.

The Mandarin Oriental Barcelona is a sanctuary in the heart of the vibrant city. Its unassuming entrance hides inside an atrium that itself sits behind a gap in the building facades along the Passeig de Gràcia. Walk through the doors, and—whoosh—the scent of, well, the Mandarin Oriental and the cool quiet of the buffered access change your demeanor. Jetlagged and sticky, I was escorted to my terrace suite to shower and unpack before I walked around the neighbor- hood. I didn’t shower; there were two bathtubs at my disposal and I only had two days to sample both. I bathed. But first I ate.

The table in my suite was laid out with fruit, champagne, little desserts, two kinds of sparkling water, and the most decadent thing I’ve ever encountered in a hotel room: a monogrammed Catalan cheesecake hiding beneath a replica Antoni Gaudí dome.

The room’s large terrace overlooks the street and Casa Batlló, a Gaudí-designed home with the structural elements that make the architect beloved world-wide. Also on the terrace was the second tub: huge, round, stone-like, and hidden behind a railing for privacy. Still, I waited until dark on the last evening before climbing in. Spanish guitar¹³ played on another terrace somewhere down the street, the smell of tapas wafted up, and the cool of the April night made me glad I’d drawn a hot bath.

I unpacked the entire contents of my bags into the walk-in closet, something I never do when I’m in a hotel but somehow seemed de rigueur for an elegant voyage by sea. Then I poked around and found a little card on the credenza, printed with something along the lines of: “Cruise Director James Templeton requests the pleasure of your company for a dinner tonight for single travelers.” I was husbandless for this trip, and thus expecting to treat it like flying in first—stick to your pod and enjoy the ride—but this was clearly not the vibe, so I dressed for dinner and gamely approached the table for eight.

Everyone else at the table had cruised many, many times, mostly in the “ultra-luxury” category.¹⁴ (One man had made an 80-day voyage the year before, and had plans for 130 next year.) Confirmed Cruisers are nerdy when it comes to ships; they have preferences. They know when a vessel last sailed before it was decommissioned. They know which is the best room on each boat, and how many restaurants there are, and which cruise they plan to book before they leave this one, in order to enjoy the 10-percent onboard booking discount. They swap stories of voyages like collectors of sports memorabilia. I sat quietly and listened, because hell if I knew anything about anything. At the end of the evening, one Frequent Floater^TM prognosticated: the seas along the Catalan Coast were a little choppy; the slight rocking meant we’d all sleep well. My head was full of boats and ships and itineraries, so I didn’t think about her forecast until I climbed into bed, arms akimbo to brace against the unfamiliar motion, and passed out for nine straight hours.

I awakened after the sleep of my life—colonoscopy excepted—to an announcement coming from directly above my head in which a modern-day Julie McCoy¹⁵ told us where we had just hauled up and what awaited us, entertainment-wise, that evening.

Breakfast every day happened at the Colonnade restaurant; it was in the Colonnade that I saw the ray of sunshine that is Sue Barker having breakfast with her husband at the same table every morning. I marveled over coffee that Sue could have her breakfast unmolested, but there were mostly Americans on board, and Americans don’t know what they have in a Sue Barker.¹⁶

11. I’m talking about Florence. And Venice.
12. Funnily enough, Epicurus preferred simple fare. I think he’d approve of the fruit.
13. If the guitar is in Spain, is it still Spanish guitar? In Canada, Canadian bacon is back bacon.
14. Clearly adherents of the Epicurean school.
15. Cruise director of the Love Boat, played with saccharine energy by an eventually cocaine-addicted Lauren Tewes (she’s since recovered). Even small, boutique cruise ships consider it a solemn duty to provide near-constant entertainment—especially in the evenings. There are nightly shows or presentations, theme dinners and parties, which I consider unnecessary-but-potentially-delightful, like the piano bars in jumbo jets of yore.
16. What they have is a French Open winner, a former world number three, with 15 singles titles and 12 doubles titles. She’s a longtime BBC broadcaster and a delightful staple on UK televisions for three decades.

We were anchored off Port-Vendres, an historic fishing town near the Spanish border, in the Pyrénées Orientales. I knew there was a tennis club—having seen it on maps—but I was unable to reach anyone ahead of time. I wandered the area for a few hours, hiking the Anse de la Mauresque trail halfway to Collioure. Wild mallow and iris clung to steep cliffs above rocky inlets; the stony landscape and deep-water harbors are why this town was a military port for millennia, why local fishing boats bring their catch here every morning, and why the Venture was anchored off shore. I could see it from a windy promontory: painted the color of brackish water, its anchor lines doing the tough work of keeping the boat steady in a rough sea. By now I knew I needn’t worry about spending a lazy vacation, but I doubled back anyway for a pan bagnat¹⁷ and to find Tennis Centre Port- Vendres. I walked up to TCPV to find four men playing doubles on a dusty concrete court under umbrella pines, and double their number inhabiting the clubhouse, which was nothing more than a glassed-in living room and a bar serving beer, which is what the non-players were drinking as they watched a game I can only assume they’d never played in their lives. It was an intimidating prospect—as any woman will attest who’s encountered European men comfortably staring from a seat in their customary watering hole—but I was here to break through any reluctance from recalcitrant locals, so intimidating prospects would be my amuse bouche for the week.

In serviceable French, I asked the barkeep If I could take a lesson. She looked around; we both knew there was no one in that clubhouse who could play, let alone give some foreigner a lesson. She looked out at the court, where the four disheveled locals were still battling: “The man who gives lessons is playing a tournament today; I’ll ask him when he finishes but I think he’ll be too tired. Call his number in an hour.” I tendered (that’s cruise-speak for shuttled on the little orange boats) back to the ship, changed into shorts, had a light bite and called the number. Yes, it would be possible, for €30. Back on the tender—this time in obvious tennis gear, which brought welcome questions from other guests whose faces registered surprise that it could be done, disappointment that they hadn’t thought of it themselves, and envy that my knees could handle it.

Alexandre greeted me at the entrance to the living room-cum-bar, found me a racquet, and led me to a sunny court away from the beer-drinking onlookers. He was awkward at first; this may have been the first time a visitor had arranged an impromptu lesson like this. But a lesson is a lesson, it was a lovely day, and I had Euros.

From the sunny side of the court, Alexandre fed balls and assessed my abilities for a few minutes. He soon identified one of many issues with my game, and told me, repeatedly, to “tournez les épaules.” Because here’s the thing: if you don’t turn your shoulders early enough in English, you won’t turn them early enough in French.

Taking a tennis lesson in another language works on your fluency in a way that buying a lavender sachet from a jaded vendor never will, as the immediacy of the directions forces quick comprehension. By the end of the lesson, I was making the same jokes in French that I make in English when I’m trying to force my body to follow simple instructions. Which if nothing else must be good for the brain.

I’ve found that taking just one lesson from any pro is the best way to improve. A new pro doesn’t know your peccadilloes; they’re not tired of seeing your mistakes; they haven’t given up on trying to fix whatever it is that’s keeping you from hitting the bigtime. I spent an hour moving quickly along the baseline (la ligne de fond), trying to tourner my épaules before I began to move. Alexandre saw improvement and probably believed he’d made a difference.

Sweaty now, I took my fourth-ever tender trip back to the ship for a rest and another singletons dinner, this time hosted by a shipboard entertainer: English
magician-comic Mandy Muden.¹⁸

17. Essentially a salade Niçoise in a bun.
18. You’re allowed to look her up.

Day two, Toulon. I knew it was Toulon, because the Speaker of Damocles above told me so a little earlier in the morning than I wanted to know. I’d arranged a padel lesson at TC Toulonnais weeks before with Valentin, a former college tennis player who was headed to Vegas the following week. I entered the busy clubhouse and identified myself as the Americaine who’d arranged a lesson. Sudden recognition crossed the receptionist’s face, and he called to my instructor. Valentin is a big guy who played in Hawaii and Florida before returning to his hometown. We walked between rows of glass boxes filled with school kids taking lessons, to an empty court where ball picker-upper tubes hung on the fence outside the glass. He showed me the best place for a righty to stand in a match: the back left corner, three feet from the side and three feet from the back. I tried to use my backhand slice from the back of the court until he explained that, in general, a sliced ball is a ball that’s coming back at you with extreme prejudice. Then we worked on hitting the ball after it bounces off the back wall and then the side wall—attempting to anticipate its double trajectory and scoop it along the side glass to send it over the net. It’s a ridiculous conceit, but I was able to do it by the end of an hour. Cost: €42.

Three days in, we anchored off Saint-Tropez. The night before, another singleton¹⁹ had told me about the little button next to the bed that mutes Julie McCoy; turning it to the “off ” position was a subversive relief. She also told me you can order caviar to your room and eat it on your veranda when you’re too tired to go to dinner, which also feels subversive.

The tourism office in the Saint-Tropez harbor identified the closest tennis club, and I called the number: oui, there’s a lesson available au jour d’hui, for €50. I spent the morning wandering the weekly market and the upscale brick-and mortar shops, assiduously avoiding Celine and YSL and Chanel, but failing to avoid the tarte Tropézienne²⁰ and the pan bagnat. Midday, it was back to
the boat to change into my tennis gear, jumping into the tender and once again explaining to gee-whizzing passengers what I’m doing and why. Google had me
walking up the narrowest of charming shady roads, occasionally jumping out of the way of traffic, hugging the wall and making a double-chin with my head to
avoid side mirrors.

At Tennis Saint Tropez, I had my first lesson on realterre battue. And damned if Valentin numéro deux didn’t notice first-thing that I wasn’t tournezing my épaules soon enough. His mild stammer made comprehension more difficult, but his optimism came through loud and clear as we worked on moving into the court to shorten the distance I’d have to travel with shoulders turned. By the end of an hour, I was moving well on the slippery clay, even without clay-court shoes. I ate another, even better Tropézienne as I walked back to the harbor via a wider road, stopping to watch men play pétanque like I was in some kind of foreign film. I returned to the boat sunbaked and tired, having built a reputation on board as the “sporty journalist.”²¹

Next morning it was Cannes, and a tennis lesson with Maxime at Parc Monfleury. Once again I found myself marching past the places beyond which tourists don’t normally go, through the neighborhoods for locals only, past grocery stores and quotidian parks and dogs and laundromats. For €60, the 20-something former elite junior looked past my épaules to the root of the issue: that your dominant eye can affect your ability to see the ball as it comes at you. Maxime has the same issue I do: a right dominant eye and a right handed game; the more closed your forehand stance, the later your good eye can get involved. He’d discovered the issue when he was living at a tennis academy in the south of France, where a ground-breaking coach began to experiment with unconventional approaches. We played around with an open stance, which allowed me to use that over-achieving eye sooner in the stroke. The new insight²² was well worth the eastwardly-increasing cost of lessons.

19. God bless the singletons; they can’t withdraw to the privacy of a marriage.
20. An orange blossom-scented brioche bun, filled with a blend of crème Chantilly and crème mousseline. I mean come on.
21. This would garner me a mention in Muden’s last show, which I missed because I was far too tired for evening frivolity. A singleton/friend live-tweeted my fame to me as I hoovered caviar.
22. Ha.

ARRIVING BY BOAT IS THE BEST—NAY, THE ONLY—way to do Monaco.²³ There’s no traffic, and you sail into the bay we see every year as part of the tennis coverage: that lovely inlet and those sleek yachts that make Monte Carlo a bucket-list tournament. It was our only two-day destination. Day one, most of the Venture passengers—even the uninitiated—took advantage of free tickets to the Round of 16 matches at the Masters 1000 event. Sue sat courtside in the section below the rest of us, many of whom had never attended or even seen a professional match. From all accounts, pro tennis was a hit.

It was a warm day for April. The tournament happens each year at the Monte Carlo Country Club, which clings to the steep hillside from near the water’s edge all the way up to a narrow plateau where most of the courts are located. Outer court matches take place up there, but the main stadia and all the restaurants are on the many layers below, temporary stands wedged in somehow. Well- dressed fans move through the grounds via endless staircases and ramps for food and cold drinks. There’s a lot of pasta and coffee and gelato on offer, as most of the attendees are Italians, in for the day to smoke right in front of the no-smoking signs.

Day two in the principality, and lesson number six. I took a taxi up the hill into France for one last eye-wateringly expensive class: €80 for an hour of padel with Arnaud, a quiet instructor at Tennis Padel Soleil. Unlike with the other pros, the language barrier caused Arnaud to clam up even though my French was improving daily so I was basically fluent at this point. He said very little as he quietly countered Valentin’s original guidance and had me stand in the right-hand corner of the court. Maybe because of the cost, I chose to believe him: standing on the right side allows a righty to use their forehand if a ball gets into the corner. Arnaud also explained a quirk of padel: that if you hit the ball hard in the right spot, your opponent will have to sprint through the opening in the court and hit the ball outside the glass. This alone makes padel a worthy pastime. It’s in some ways the pickleball of Europe, but—as with everything else—the European version is way, way better. To begin with: just as checkers takes up a perfectly good chess board, and pickleball takes up a perfectly good tennis court, padel doesn’t presume; it has its own place, and it’s foreign and physically demanding and there’s no “kitchen.” Let’s get padel going everywhere.

Porto Venere was our last stop before Rome. I had no lesson here; I asked IN PERFECT ITALIAN but Luca gave me the Gallic shrug instead of the warm welcome I expected. This is just as well; if the price increases as we sailed eastward were any guide, a lesson here would run me €100.

I walked fast and took the hills at speed for exercise, and ate the best sandwich I’ve ever had: a warm rosetta roll, sliced open, drizzled with Ligurian olive oil and layered with white anchovies, their vinegary tartness edging out the oily texture of regular acciughe. I walked the narrow streets of the medieval town, the pressure of my hand cracking the golden crust around the soft interior of the bun as tiny silver fish drooped over the sides.

For the last night, the Honor of My Presence was requested at Sue Barker’s table, so I skipped the veranda caviar and sidled up next to the CBE.²⁴ What I expected: a lovely chat about tennis amongst the ten of us. What I got: seven starstruck dinner companions and one insufferable man who sought to monopolize the conversation to the extreme ire of the rest of us.

We docked in Civitavecchia outside Rome, and I rolled my luggage to a waiting car. The 45-minute drive into the city was the longest I’d been immobile for nine days. I chuckled at my original fear of inactivity; cruising—by making it possible to visit a different town each day without the need to pack and repack and lug bags and catch flights and drive unfamiliar roads—leaves you extra energy for the active stuff. In truth, the lotus-eating is more likely to happen at home: Most of us enjoy such relative ease these days, we’re living in a torpor that only travel can bust through.

Shteyngart and DFW installed themselves in mediocre berths, and allowed teeming crowds to ruin their miserable vacations. I can’t advise that. I do suggest you seek the pleasure of a lavish voyage along an unfamiliar coast, and play a lot of tennis along the way. If you’re too tired for dinner, there’s always caviar back on the boat. Liner. Yacht?

23. Yes I just heard myself. I stand by my statement.
24. Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which you get in Britain if you're absolutely awesome.

Wendy Laird is Racquet’s Features Editor. She’s a practicing Epicurean, and is positively Pentacostal about padel now.