Jess Battison
When you get home from a holiday, the blues usually follow. You’re gutted it’s come to an end, missing the weather and the carefree lifestyle already.
But if you’ve been on a cruise there might be another thing you need to come down from.
And that’s ‘sea legs’. This doesn’t affect everyone, but one bloke suffers from it big time after living on cruise ships for 23 years.
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Mario Salcedo ditched his international finance director job to take up the cruise life, going on more than 100 back-to-back cruises before falling in love with Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas.
And by 2016, he’d spent over £1 million on his permanent-holiday lifestyle. Known as ‘Super Mario’, he typically takes a 15-day break each year (with a 15-month hiatus during Covid).
He dubs his Miami apartment his ‘hotel’ seeing as he’s barely there, and when he is, he has those sea legs to deal with.
When he’s standing back on dry land, it’s not so easy for him, as he told Condé Nast Traveller: "I’ve lost my land legs, so when I’m swaying so much I can’t walk in a straight line. I’m so used to being on ships that it feels more comfortable to me than being on land."
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Yep, sea legs are what happen when your body and brain adjust to being on a cruise ship, with all that rocking and rolling of the ocean underneath. Except when you get off, your body maintains the adjustment while you’re trying to be steady and solid again.
Onboard, SS&H say you get those sea legs when your motion sickness stops, when ‘the inner ear and the brain resolve what seem to be conflicting messages’.
And when you step back onto solid ground, you might again face dizziness and nausea, known as ‘mal de debarquement syndrome’.
There are a couple of ways to get rid of it, similar to the strategies you’d use to get rid of travel sickness on board.
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It’s recommended to keep yourself moving or go on walks and car rides to provide that missing sensation of movement while you get used to being on land again.
You should also stay hydrated, get enough sleep and try over-the-counter motion sickness medications.
It may only take a day to get rid of those annoying sea legs but for others, it can be slightly longer. Ah, the holiday comedown is never easy, is it?