My dislike of beaches is fairly well known, at this point, as only someone whose ancestry runs through Scotland and contains skin cancer on both sides of their family can fully understand. And I generally dislike cruises, as well, of the sort that unload hordes of tourists at cruise terminals for three hours before lumbering off to the next port of call. I’m more a wander-through-every-nook-and-cranny kind of tourist, and I just don’t get the kind of time to explore that I’d like.

But I sometimes find myself on cruises — my father likes them, and I like my father, and there are worse ways to spend a week than snoozing through another sunny afternoon while an oversized Piña Colada melts on the table beside you. So it was I found myself on a cruise to the Panama canal in mid-November 2016, among members of my extended family, some of whom had voted Republican that year. I recall one of our stops being canceled, owing to a hurricane. It was a weird trip.

I tried to make the best of it, so when we stopped at the Grand Caymans I signed up for one of the excursions, where you’d swim with sting rays and then spend a couple hours on the beach. And the swimming with rays was a lot of fun; we took a boat out to a sandbar in the middle of the ocean where they congregated and they swarmed all around, brushing past your legs and sometimes hopping up on your back in their excitement.

Then we went to the beach, and that was the revelation. Beautifully white sand all the way from one end of the island to the other. The water was an impossible blue, deeper and brighter than a cloudless day, and you could see clear down to the bottom of the seafloor. The beach had the usual ramshackle bar and umbrellas and overpriced Mudslides — I had two — but in its heart it was the tropical paradise I had been promised forever. It was every sunny “Wish You Were Here” postcard ever published. It was where the cool kids hung out in every tropical Hollywood comedy in the ’80s. As a rule, I still don’t like beaches. That beach proved, once again, there’s always an exception.