MAKE IT THE MED Part I of 2

Each year airports mob up, waits for planes grow longer and getting to often inconveniently located airports at least couple of hours before flight time seems bad enough on business trips, but when it's vacation time, who needs the hassle? Classic solutions to this problem include staying put with rental villas, trains, and ships. For brevity, and survival of readers who might otherwise motor about in French traffic circles, we'll not mention cars and in particular, some of those budget pismire projectiles too common in Europe. Just think about airplanes as buses without wings, and there's no need to consider bus tours.

Villas, assuming you've checked the drains and know there's not a highway 20 feet from the bedroom or a disco next door, nicely handle vacations for those don't plan to move much, and trains get you around Europe - don't ask about AMTRAC in the USA, but you still pack and unpack daily. Besides, if you commute to work on the train or underground a break from rolling stock seems in order.

That's the best solution? We find cruise ships eliminate packing and unpacking, uncertainty about food and services and, increasingly, they move you at night so you enjoy shore diversions during daylight hours. Cruise ships offer more decent to delightful food than anyone can eat, comfortable cabins, extensive public spaces, evening entertainments, plus what seem to be hourly diversions and snacks each and every day. You can even get on the Internet – sort of. Most of all today's cruises offer savvy travelers all sorts of choices.

To start, cruise lines differ. Renaisance isn't Celebrity, Princess or Windstar. Each line has a certain flavor even though crews seem increasingly international, and cruise lines offer a similar ports in Europe, Alaska and the Mediterranean in the summer and to the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean and the summer.

Granted, in Innocent's Abroad Mark Twain called cruising "Incarceration with the certainty of seasickness and the possibility of shipwreck." Of course the sail and paddle steamers he used are closer to the size of today's tenders as today's cruise ships grew longer than a couple of football fields. Besides, there are solutions to seasickness, such as ReliefBands or, for some, patches and pills.

Cruise passengers vary too and wise travelers carefully consider passenger demographics. For example, shorter cruises in warmer waters collect a younger crowd than two week or longer cruises in the Baltic or Alaska's Inside Passage. Some cruise lines are dressy. Others are casual. Some ships stick you at a fixed table for an early or late dinner sitting rather than offering passenger open seating. Tip: With fixed seating late dinners give you more time for shore diversions.

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