Nov 17: Royal Frenzy

The weekend weather was perfect in Fort Lauderdale. Perfect for gawking anyway. Well ok, it was perfect for many things, really just about anything you might have wanted to do outdoors. But gawking seemed to be the order of both days, as far as I could tell. I've never seen anything quite like this before. Of course, I'm talking about the presence of Fort Lauderdale's newest, biggest year-round resident. Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas is the largest cruise ship on earth so when I say "biggest" I'm not kidding. This thing is 225,000 tons-o-fun. As it turns out, my previous blog about Oasis was right about one thing. They couldn't hide this ship if they wanted to. You can see Oasis of the Seas partially from Federal Highway just north of the airport. I even caught a glimpse of its smokestack as I pulled off I-595 this morning.

But this weekend's cruise ship frenzy happened much closer to Port Everglades. My exposure to the public's intense interest in Oasis began Saturday evening as I headed north on A1A. Drivers were driving and gawking, walkers were walking and gawking - all in the middle of the 17^th Street drawbridge. People actually parked their cars, got out and took pictures. On the bridge. This isn't a great idea, I might add, in case you think it's legal or something. It's not legal, trust me.

The irony was that these folks weren't even looking at the right ship. They were holding up traffic and turning their cameras on an entirely different, if also large, ship from another cruise line. Oasis wasn't in port at the time. But on Sunday I finally saw the real thing for myself. So did a lot of other people who, yes, continued to walk over the bridge in a near constant parade and continued to park on the bridge. Or to simply drive over the bridge at eight miles an hour. I actually clocked the gawking speed of the cars in front of me. Folks are dying for a gander at this ship. As for me, I found a good spot under the bridge to see what I could see. I was maybe a mile away at the time but it didn't matter. Even at that distance, I got some sense of how different Oasis of the Seas really is. More than anything, the hull shape and width stands out. Oasis looks flat on the bottom, which allowed the designers to build a very broad ship for all that extra space. They need it too. Oasis of the Seas carries in excess of 7,000 passengers and crew - more than the population of Broward County's Pembroke Park. Wow. Now that's a party at sea. This seems like a wonderfully enjoyable cruise ship and I hope some day to sail on her. For now, I'll just have to make do with eight-miles-per-hour gawking.