Lost and Found 5 Year Old: A Cruise Gone Wrong

by Rease Kirchner

When I was 5 years old, my parents won a cruise to the Bahamas. These cruises were definitely aimed at an older crowd, but my parents decided to buy 3 cheap kids tickets and haul my brothers and I along. When you are 5 and you get to go on a boat, it all seems like an awesome idea. I imagined that Flounder himself would happily jump along beside the boat, updating me on the haps with Sebastian and the rest of the citizens of Atlantica. Sadly, my first cruise was nothing like I had imagined.

It all started so well…

It started out okay. My parents ordered drinks with extra umbrellas and plastic swords that speared through maraschino cherries. True to the sibling code, my brothers and I were willing to fight over anything, including those tiny swords. While the cherries were a nice bonus, we scrambled to grab the swords first so we could collect different colors and have mini sword fights. My parents didn’t seem to mind too much, probably due to the number of drinks we insisted on them ordering.

Killer Chef-Doctors!

I was having a pretty good time minus my battles with my brothers who continuously stole my teddy bear and threatened to drown him, but my cruise experience went sour pretty quickly. All of the crew members had to wear the same white uniforms. They all look like overdressed chefs or doctors, or both. This weird army of white-coat-wearing people set off alarms in my tiny 5-year-old brain. I was absolutely terrified of them. However, I was one of the only kids on the cruise so I attracted quite a bit of attention. These employees continuously approached me, attempted to chat with me and offered me candy. No matter what my mother told me, I simply could not accept that the white coats were just a uniform and that these people were not an alien race of killer chef-doctors.

I was too cute for the killer chef-doctors to resist.

I stayed close to my mom’s side as best I could to avoid the employees, but at one point I was told to go off with my father and brothers. My father was never very good at wrangling us and after passing through a crowd, I was utterly lost. Now, this should not have been a big deal as I was on a boat so really, there were not many places to go. Obviously, no one could kidnap me and take me off the boat, so all I had to do was find an authority figure, right? Well, turns out there are no policemen on cruises, just the killer chef-doctors. I feared they would notice a small child wandering around by herself so I sprinted between locations, hiding behind plants and tip-toeing between doorways. I imagined I was as stealthy as the Pink Panther but in all reality I was probably turning heads left and right.

Completely lost

After a few minutes of searching out my father while trying to hide the fact that I was unsupervised, I started to get anxious. Where were my parents? What will happen if the killer chef-doctors find me? How do I get home? I decided to start randomly opening doors, assuming I would eventually find my parents magically waiting behind one. I pulled open a huge, heavy door and walked right into a swarm of chef-doctors. I had happened upon the kitchen and was thus assaulted by a poisonous fog (more likely steam) which oozed from the killer chef-doctor lair.

One of them spotted me and started walking towards me. I’m pretty sure he was smiling,  but I took the showing of teeth as a threat and ran for my life. I sprinted down a staircase and finally came to a stop in a small lobby. My heart was pounding and people were walking around me like I wasn’t even there. I panicked and simply stopped in the middle of all of them, burst into tears and screamed “I WANT MY MOMMY!”

Where is Mommy?

A chubby woman of mom-age rushed to my side and her husband followed suit. She grabbed my hand and tried to calm me down. I hiccuped through my sobs “mommy…lost…scary chef-doctors….”. She looked pretty confused but I think she pieced together that I was in need of help. She asked me to tell her what my mother looked like and what she was wearing. Of course I described her as most 5 year olds would “Her hair is pretty. I use the yellow crayon but sometimes brown. She is tall. Sometimes she wears Macho Man sunglasses.” I then described the outfit my mom had worn perhaps 3 days earlier, focusing intently on the fact that she had a duck lounging in a beach chair on her t-shirt. Obviously, I didn’t give them much to work with.

Dropped off at lost and found

This woman had a crying 5 year old on her hands who could give her no more to work with than “Macho Man Sunglasses”. The cruise ship was huge and since I lost my mind every time I saw an employee, she was left with very few options.  After conferring with her husband, they made a decision. I was taken to the Lost and Found.

Thankfully, the young man working at the lost and found for some reason was not required to wear the white uniform, so I was able to stay calm as the nice woman sat me up on the counter and explained what had happened. The poor guy clearly had no idea what to do with a 5 year olds as his job description had more to do with guarding lost hats than lost children. He asked me what my name was, I gave him my middle name that my parents call me and he announced over the loud speaker:

“Will the parents of Dawn Kirchner please report to the Lost and Found? I repeat, the parents of Dawn Kirchner, please report to the Lost and Found”

My surrogate mom waited with me until my father showed up. He was angry with me for wandering off and also at a loss for why I could not just ask an employee for help instead of being escorted to the lost and found. He clearly had no idea about the poison-fog lair or the dangerous nature of killer chef-doctors. I was disgusted with both his lack of understanding and inability to keep me safe from sad creatures, so I begged for my mother.

I spent most of the remaining trip on the deck with my seasick mother. Luckily, the seasickness kept all the killer chef-doctors at bay and we arrived safely in the Bahamas, but I have not been on a cruise since.