Put these words together. Cruise ship. Bridge. What do you get?
A visit to the bridge of a cruise ship, of course. Passengers often get the opportunity as part of a ship’s tour. Lucky passengers sometimes get the chance to be there when a ship is arriving at or leaving a port. It’s an exhilarating experience, to see what the captain and the bridge crew see when a ship carrying 2,000 or more passengers is on the move.
Not so fast.
There are other ways to connect those words — cruise ship and bridge. When a cruise ship is in a waterway with bridges, there’s the matter of clearance. Some bridges are too low for cruise ships. Somebody told us when the Oasis of the Seas sailed out of Germany, there’s a bridge it has to clear that’s so low that the captain had to pick up speed to get the ship deep enough in the water to miss hitting the bridge.
Neither of these word associations apply, however, to people who go on cruise ships to play bridge. The card game, you know. The mind-bending, memory-testing card game of all card games, say those who play it.
Every ship we’ve been on has a card room, or a place where people can go and play cards. Some probably even play bridge. These are the casual bridge players. They’re friendly. They talk around the table. Sometimes they even tell a rookie bridge player what to play, or how to play. Or even play again.
Then there are bridge cruises.
Actually, there are websites devoted to bridge cruises. People, too. All you gotta do is ask. On one, you can play bridge from Buenos Aires to Miami. From London to Rome. On another, from Seattle to Alaska and back. There are bridge experts everywhere waiting to teach you more about this cerebral game.
Most of the cruises seem to be 12 to 14 days. Learning bidding tendencies takes time. The Salobs, Roberta and Arnold, seem to be the most aggressive. They’ll do five bridge cruises 
this year, starting in March. Five! All of them are on either the Crystal Symphony or the Crystal Serenity. That means they’re upscale. Six-star ships (we always thought “five-star” was the ultimate adjective…times change). That means it takes more than cruise writers’ income to go.
Of course, you have to like bridge, too.
Assuming you do, and assuming money is no object (or at least a small object), you can go bridging with the Salobs to Mexico in March (10 days), from London to Rome in August (12 days), go back to Barcelona on the return trip (12 days), from Athens to Istanbul via Israel and Egypt (unrest permitting) in October (12 days) and from Miami to the Panama Canal and back over Christmas and New Year’s (14 days).
Sounds great! As long as your idea of bridge isn’t where the captain cruises or something that goes over water.