Cruising by design

摘要

It was France that introduced Stephen Payne and I both to ocean liner travel (we made our first liner trips in her in May and August 1974 respectively) and to each other. In October 1979, Stephen had his first article published in Ships Monthly entitled 'The Happy Return' which was a history of France penned just when she was sold to Norwegian Caribbean Lines to become Norway. Well, this ardent France buff sure did not think it was a 'happy' to have the peerless French flagship 'demoted' to a cruise ship and from Miami no less when it was still a backwater of small ships. And I said so in a letter to Ships Monthly in the February 1980 issue. Stephen wrote to me and explained, as all good authors would, that the title was not his idea but the editor's. It was all the beginning of a transatlantic friendship that has endured all these years.