This Florida widow has visited the ports of over 100 countries around the world.
Home sweet home. (via go-diva.webs.com)
Just before 86-year-old Lee Wachtstetter's banker husband died back in 1997, he told her, "Don't stop cruising." The two had enjoyed 89 cruises together in their 50 years of marriage, and Wachtstetter took his advice literally.
She sold her Fort Lauderdale home and moved onto a cruise ship.
Wachtstetter has been living on the Crystal Serenity—an 11-year-old, 1,070-passenger ship—for the past seven years. She's visited too many countries to count, and rarely bothers getting off the boat when it docks anymore. She told the Asbury Park Press that it's a "stress-free, fairy-tale life."
(via Wikipedia)
It's also a very expensive life.
Wachtstetter estimates that a year on board costs her about $164,000. According to the Asbury Park Press, that amount covers her "single-occupancy seventh deck stateroom, regular and specialty restaurant meals with available lunch and dinner beverages, gratuities, nightly ballroom dancing with dance hosts and Broadway-caliber entertainment—as well as the captain's frequent cocktail parties, movies, lectures, plus other scheduled daily activities."
It's not what I'd do with that kind of cash (hello, laptop charger for every outlet in my apartment!), but you can see the appeal of life being a non-stop party.
One of the staterooms on board the Crystal Serenity. (Crystal Cruises)
Wachtstetter makes friends on board by sitting at an eight-person table at dinner and teaching fellow passengers how to do needlepoint (she makes them for the crew members). The crew members deserve it, says Wachtstetter:
"The [655] crew members bend over backwards to keep me happy. Some are almost like family now. If they don't have what I want, they get it. Even if they have to buy it off the ship or make it to my specific needs."
The one downside—aside from pretty much every reason you can think of that living on a cruise would be horrible—is that Wachtstetter misses her kids and grandkids. She keeps in touch with them online and when the boat docks in Miami a few times a year.
And she certainly has a good reason for them to come and visit.