Rare but welcome are those occasions when I arrive in my room after a day of travel, and find a towel animal. It’s really a lost art.
But recently, when BackpackMr and I took our first cruise ever aboard Holland America’s MS Oosterdam, we discovered a zoo.
A towel zoo, that is.
Towel origami.
Towel art.
Whatever you want to call it.
We stayed in a really, really nice suite. It was a splurge and it was worth it.

Yes, there were fresh flowers and champagne and a huge balcony. But can you believe adorable towel animals greeted us every night after turndown service?! (Another luxury service I’m also rather unaccustomed to!)
So this isn’t a thinker post (if you want one of those, check out my trip to Vietnam to honor a friend who fought in the American War, or this one on Walls,) and you won’t find any deep messages here today.
I’m just going to share pictures of the cute towel animals, and I hope that’s okay. Because, it’s Monday and life is hard and towel animals might just be the thing that brightens someone’s day, as it did mine.
So here we go. The towel animals of the Holland America MS Oosterdam cruise ship!








The only drawbacks of having these cuties in the room are that I a) had to cover their eyes when I changed into jammies and b) couldn’t bear to end their cuteness by using the towels themselves.
Of course, I have deeper thoughts about the cruise experience, and I’ve been percolating on them for a while. We’ll tackle those later. I have to remind myself sometimes that it’s okay just to enjoy travel. To pack the think box away for a bit. To delight in simple pleasures without noodling on the state of the world.
So for now, let’s enjoy the simple pleasures of cute towel animals.
Thank you to our amazing cabin stewards who gave me this tiny bit of joy every night before bed. I hope you enjoyed the leftover Coronas–we asked the monkey to keep watch until you could pick them up!
Charish Badzinski is an explorer and award-winning features, food and travel writer. When she isn’t working to build her blog: Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World, she applies her worldview to her small business, Rollerbag Goddess Global Communications, providing powerful storytelling to her clients.
Posts on the Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World travel blog are never sponsored and have no affiliate links, so you know you will get an honest review, every time.
Find Charish on Twitter: @rollrbaggoddess and on Instagram at @rollerbaggoddess. You can also read more about Charish Badzinski’s professional experience in marketing, public relations and writing.
Rollerbag Goddess Rolls the World by Charish Badzinski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The towel animals are inspired! Love your phrasing of the nearly lost art. Very funny : ) R
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