Cruising with the Beatles.

Fun Beatles fandom events happen from time to time, and I'm sure it would be great fun for me to one day make it one of them. The Fest for Beatles Fans, for instance, just finished up in Chicago this past weekend, and I thought I might go to that (with my awesomely geeky friend who lives in Chicago) before I realized that, lodged as it was between a week of work travel and two weeks of for-fun travel that had been previously booked, it would have been insanity for me to attempt. Eh, maybe I'll make it to the New York metro Fest next year. (And there are other fan conventions too, of course-- I'm too lazy to link, but they're easy to find via the Google.)

But I'm just meandering, as usual. Point is, I've recently heard of one of the more creative Beatles fan events: Woody Lifton, whom fans will know from his legendarily amazing radio show Pop Go the Beatles and from his new wicked thorough site, The Beatles History (alway to your right as well), is actually launching a Beatles Tribute Cruise that departs next March. I don't know how one goes about doing this, but Woody, as usual, was awesome-- he got Royal Caribbean to agree to put a Beatles spin on its western Caribbean 6-night itinerary, and he booked BritBeat, a renowned cover band, to play gigs on board the ship, plus tons of interesting Beatles authors and speakers, like May Pang and Jude Kessler (Beatle-centric novelist) and Shannon (Beatle-centric artist) and Paul Saltzman (author of The Beatles in India) and Lord knows how many more. There are a ton of special events planned, in addition to various things to do at the ship's fun ports of call.

I went on my first cruise last summer, actually. It was a reunion with a bunch of my friends from college-- 10 of us or so keep in close touch via email, but what with significant others and so forth it was getting to the point where there were too many of us to meet up elsewhere in a clean way. It's annoying to, you know, make a restaurant reservation for that many people at once. So the cruise was kind of perfect, because of the way it organizes the various fun things to do, and it was also way fun. By a strange coincidence, we did an itinerary very similar to the one that the Beatles cruise will do, with stops in Belize and Cozumel and some other western Caribbean ports of call. It was fantastic, and quite economical as well. (Or it would have been, if my husband and I were not such lushes. Our bar tab at the end of the week was mildly embarrassing. But hell, it was vacation.)

Anyway, that's apropos of nothing, except that this particular Beatles cruise sounds wicked fun. Here's the website again. I hope to make it myself, though I'm not sure it'll happen-- we're taking a big vacation this year that will make a financial impact on us for sure. But check it out, because it might be just what you're looking for. It's going to ROCK. For sure.