In 2024 we moved across the ocean on a boat. First thing to acknowledge is:

Cruise ships are the worst for the environment

About 20 years ago I saw a little chart in GOOD Magazine that compared the carbon impact of various types of travel. The method that was the worst, and by a long, long, long way? Traveling by boat! Or, well, on a cruise ship, which is the way people these days typically travel by sea. I never forgot that little data viz cause it was so surprising. How could it be so bad when you can just float!? Well, it’s basically like carrying an amusement park and hotel with you everywhere you go.

I avoided cruises ever since. But when it became apparent it was a way to get our cat across the ocean, I began rationalizing, surely in 20 years, technology must have improved, right?! I did not search for the answer to that question till midway through the journey. Unsurprisingly the answer is no, the situation has not improved and, if anything, has gotten worse with cruise lines building ever bigger ships. The multitude of ways cruise ships are bad far exceed the little glimpse I got in that chart. I had heard about the crowds trampling Venice and Barcelona, but until this piece hadn’t realized about the health impacts on people who live near popular ports. To say nothing of the waste and disturbance of the oceans themselves. Maybe I just cashed in my environmental karma of not owning a car for 20 years? I dunno. But it’s bad and I participated and cannot talk about the rest of the experience without that acknowledgement.

Cruises are for extroverts

The journey we took is technically a crossing not a cruise (which also contributed to my rationalization that maybe it wasn’t as bad), but just because it’s a purpose built ocean liner to go from North America to Europe does not make it environmentally friendly. While it didn’t have the climbing wall we saw on another cruise ship that went past, it had multiple pools, theatres, restaurants, and of course, the entire hotel and structure for 2,400 passengers and 1,200 staff. And, boy, those thousands of passengers want to chat. I was not in any way prepared for the social aspect of being on a boat with thousands of people. Every passenger we encountered wanted to talk basically all the time. People were really friendly, but I didn’t know that it was going to be round the clock small talk for a week. Some things immediately became clear in these conversations:

• People on cruises love cruises. Almost every person we talked to is a regular cruise goer. It was rare to find another first timer. Even after just one day, it was easy to see why this would be the case. You can completely remove your brain from your skull. Everything is done for you. Plentiful food and drink. Endless activities. Room housekeeping multiple times a day. Thousands of strangers to chat with. If you want to chill out, everything is designed to make that easy, and even to help you explore what exact kind of chilling out you may want to do (watercolors? pub quiz? aqua zumba? Shakespeare workshop?).
• You are on holiday and the rest of the world does not exist. The small talk was small. We were surrounded by mostly Europeans who clearly enjoy international travel and it was abundantly clear it would not be OK to talk politics. Once or twice, much later in the trip, conversations veered even slightly in that direction and I was so hungry for more but it was clear that was not the setting. Yom Kippur fell during our trip and multiple times the cantor who led the Kol Nidre service said since we’re on holiday, it’s fine, do what you want! In practice, I did mostly follow his advice (streaming yizkor service while visiting our cat aside), but I was still a little surprised how overriding the holiday vibe was above all else.
• There’s a strict divide between passengers and staff. Everyone I encountered was super nice and friendly. But the hierarchy present in so many ways was still jarring, and largely ignored in conversation with other passengers. Some staff members did share a bit about their experience, and how within the staff there are rigid hierarchical subdivisions (maybe cause it’s a British ship and they love hierarchies?). The racial and economic divide was also not frequently commented upon, but hard to ignore. The passenger demographics were shockingly white. It made sense the demographics are older (who else would have a week to travel in the middle of the school year?) but I could count on my hands the number of families I saw with at least one Black family member. And other ethnicities were not much more prevalent, which was in contrast to the staff that was majority people of color and at least a plurality of whom were from Asia. The class piece was kind of fascinating because the cheapest ticket is about $1,000 per person, which is a significant amount of money, but if you think of it as a week of food and hotel, it’s really not a bad value. Some rooms cost exceptionally more than that though, but honestly, I don’t know enough about retiree fashion to be able to tell the full class picture of passengers.
• It was really convenient to be able to talk about moving. Since the culture is so chatty, it was very handy to have a topic of conversation that was pretty neutral and could be short or long depending on the context. People also loved hearing about our cat being in the kennel. I’ve found talking about the move to be convenient in many other social settings as well! (family reunions, work conferences, random parties) I wonder how much mileage you get out of a move, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years? I’ll try to reportback.

Packing for the cruise

After initially booking the boat in order to move the cat to the UK, we went back and forth a bit about whether we would stick with the plan or just take the cat through mainland Europe instead. What ultimately swayed me to stick with the boat was reading people online who talked about how on the boat you have unlimited baggage so you can take as much as you want. The only requirement is that it all of the bags have to fit in your room. (We heard of one other passenger with 36 bags!!) Online someone mentioned it’s also a really good way to take fragile things like artwork, which sounded like a great idea to me!

So I read you could take a lot of bags, but not about the logistics, how does this work in reality? This I could find very little information on (even though one person on a cruise forum reported seeing a sofa someone wrapped and put on their balcony). I scoured forums, watched Youtube videos on how to transport art, and then realized there was actually a more significant limitation: getting the luggage to and from the boat!

This led to another research phase of van rentals, bag shipping companies, “man with a van” companies, and even a stray idea of posting on reddit to see if someone in our new town might drive four hours and pick us up from the port. All of these options were some annoying combination of expensive or risky.

Instead, we went with the simplest option. We got a ride from family to the port and from the port so we were limited by their car sizes. This meant no random artwork or a big jumble of fragile things, but it did make it a much easier process of figuring out what to pack cause we just took a few suitcases and other kinds of bags.

The other unknown was — how does baggage actually work with the boat? I read conflicting information online. Some things said you had to be able to carry your bags onto the boat, so we limited our array of bags to what we could actually (if we had to) carry (plus the cat!). But it turns out that was not the case at all. Upon arriving at the port in New York, there’s a giant trolley that you throw all your luggage on. We could have loaded that up with all the bags and then only carried by hand a random assortment of stuff (I even had a little handtruck ready for this task but we didn’t bring it since we thought we had to carry all the bags ourselves!). For disembarkation, if you can carry your things by hand, you can do that yourself, otherwise you can put all your bags out in the hall the night before. A bonus of using the kennel is you are in one of the early groups for disembarkation, so again we didn’t have to lug every single bag ourselves (and at the port there were extremely easy to use and free carts for us to get all our stuff to the car).

So the baggage situation was actually much easier and manageable than we thought. With what I know now, I would have taken more random things onto the boat. Maybe some art, if it would have fit in the car, but already there’s some random things we want like a bathroom scale or a like, one foot cube bluetooth speaker or small stool. Or our cat’s running water dish (most electronics are not a good idea to transport but that is such a silly one, it probably would have been fine or at least worth the maybe savings of $40 to try!). Some of these things I may be able to shove into a large suitcase on a plane in the future, but good lord there’s a lot of stupid tiny household items that just really add up and we could have easily jumbled into a car trunk.

More trips to come

In the end, we treated packing for the boat more like packing for a holiday than for a permanent move. (I didn’t even mention the whole “smart attire” and gala evenings aspect of the voyage, which necessitated a very specific wardrobe! As usual, Man in Seat 61 has an amazing point by point overview of the every facet of this trip.) We always figured we’d do a shipping container eventually and now we definitely will need to because it’s very unlikely we can in good (climate) conscience do the crossing again and there is a stupid amount of books, art, bric a brac, and maybe some furniture we still need to transport. I guess we could research if we wanted to join our stuff on a shipping container voyage across the ocean, which is allegedly better for the environment somehow, I guess maybe because it is more efficient use of the space on the ship?

Anyway, I’m already planning all the random things I will need to lug back on my next trip (on whatever mode of transportation) back and forth. I will definitely continue taking my friend Eva’s advice to load up my bags (and those of any willing friends and family) for each journey. I will seek to document the shipping container phase of this project as well (…and maybe the home buying/selling/how do you have parts of your life in multiple places aspects, too).

Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know more about or if there’s anything about how terrible cruises are that I should know more about (I am very motivated by guilt). If you are also planning a similar move, feel free to reach out. It is a stressful process and happy to help if I can!

• Header image description: a look at the Queen Mary 2 ship at the port in Brooklyn with some luggage carts about, a “welcome to Brooklyn” sign, and a gigantic cruise (crossing?) ship
• Photo credit: Katherine Wood (all photos)

Last modified on September 15, 2025