Some walked off the ship and kissed the ground. The more than 4,200 people trapped several days aboard a disabled cruise ship were jubilant as they reached a U.S. port with tales of overflowing toilets, food shortages and camping on the decks under bedsheets, AP reported. The arrival of the Carnival cruise ship Triumph was anything but for the cruise company and for the industry at large, which now faces the challenge of making a trip at sea romantic again. "This is my first and last cruise," passenger Kendall Jenkins said. The ship, left powerless and drifting in the Gulf of Mexico by an engine-room fire, arrived Thursday night to cheering from passengers wrapped in bathrobes for the cold. The ship's slow approach, pulled and pushed by tugboats, was preceded by a flood of complaints as passengers finally came within mobile phone range. "It was horrible, just horrible" said Maria Hernandez, 28, tears welling in her eyes as she talked about waking up to smoke in her lower-level room Sunday and the days of heat and stench that followed. She said her group hauled mattresses to upper-level decks to escape the heat. Frustrated by slopping sewage and nonworking toilets, people used the bathroom in plastic bags. -- SPA
