Not what you want to see, with a cruise on this ship scheduled for September. (Photo provided to news outlets by Royal Caribbean)

When things go bad on those massive hotels-on-the-sea, my dear wife Karen and I had a fallback position. Stuck in the ocean? Not our cruise line. No food, bathrooms plugged? Different company. Tugged back to safety? OK, change the channel, already. Do we really need to hear this?

A couple of minutes ago Karen looked over my shoulder at “The Today Show.”

Fire on the ocean.

Two decks affected, said the voice. Fire started on the third deck and spread to the fourth … “The whole front of the ship!” screamed my brain at the video. It’s Royal Caribbean, noticed Karen. Our cruise line.

The passengers filed to the emergency stations after being awoken by alarms at 3 a.m., went on the report, complete with cell phone video. The Grandeur of the Seas was recently refurbished … That’s our ship, Karen said.

The trip left Baltimore … That’s our port, we sighed together.

In September, we and our merry group of cruise-lovers are scheduled for Baltimore-to-Bermuda-and-back. It’ll be my sixth cruise. Karen became part of the traveling party before me. We love it.

This time, we did not change the channel. In fact, the report was too short. A couple of passengers said the crew reacted swiftly, surely, professionally. They all said they’d go back. The passengers will be flown back to Baltimore today. “We’re not in the business of disrupting vacations,” said the Royal Caribbean CEO, on the ship in Jamaica. Royal Caribbean will not only refund passengers the cost of that trip, but offer chits for a future cruise.

What now, for us?

They’ll fix whatever went wrong and go over the whole ship oh-so-carefully, Karen said. But, we wonder together, will Grandeur of the Seas be fixed in time for that September cruise? Will RC bring in a different ship? Will our vacation be disrupted? If we indeed set sail from Baltimore that day, can I truly believe it won’t happen to us?