Every age has its archetypal travel moment. In ours,it takes place on an airplane: It’s after you land, when that little “bleep” sounds and everyone bolts up for the wait to get off the plane. That’s when you realize how inhumane and nasty the whole experience of flying has become, because that instant – when you are surrounded by a bunch of bounced-about, disheveled people who have made no attempt to know you because they are so fixated on their cell phones they’ve forgotten what actual communication is, and you can barely breathe without someone coughing or sneezing your breath away, and you feel that after enduring yet another dose of this airborne purgatory, what you need is a day at the spa and not a trip around another baggage carousel – that is the epitome of travel in our time.

How depressing! And for what it’s worth, business class doesn’t impress me much, either: You’re still stuck in a plane. But we are lured by cheap fares and sold on speed, so despite our misgivings about taking to the skies as an authentic or even enjoyable mode of travel and all the anxieties about turbulence, terrorism, and even UFOs (Unidentified Food-like Objects), most travelers buckle up and go. We ignore or passively bemoan the fact that cheap air travel takes any last trace of glamour in travel and dashes it on the rocks of a quickie commercial transaction. That it has given rise to the kind of package tourism that turns far-flung local economies inside out. And that aviation is a major source of carbon dioxide pollution because planes burn huge amounts of fossil fuels at high altitudes. Wouldn’t it be better for travelers and, for that matter, the whole planet, to take a cruise instead?

I’m not the only one who thinks so. It’s true that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) predicts airline passenger growth rates of around 6% annually through 2009, and that already more than 500,000 airline passengers cross international borders a day, according to the State of the World Forum. Moreover, the total number of air passengers is set to double by 2020. But the cruise trade is even hotter, proportionately speaking, with the industry averaging an 8% annual growth in number of passengers since 1980, according to the Cruise Line International Association. A record 8.9 million North Americans cruised in 2004, compared with 6.9 million in 2000. Those figures could even reflect the beginning of a sea change in travelers’ thinking – more of them seem to be tuning in to slowness as a virtue.

There is reason to celebrate the growing preference for the pleasures of drifting from port to port as opposed to racing from airport terminal to rental car hut to overcrowded highway. The number and variety of itineraries, from an instant and affordable “easy” cruise (thinkeasycruise.com) to cruises around the Omani coast to Scandinavian circuits that include the remote Faroe Islands, have proliferated. And if discovery of foreign lands in the age of Google Maps is all but impossible, there is still nothing like the thrill of arriving at a destination by sea. I will never forget my first glimpse of Africa: From the deck of the Radisson Diamond, the main mosque of Casablanca towered over the coast and seemed to spring up from the ocean itself. Had I arrived in Morocco by plane, my first impression of the country would have passed in a blur.

Even more telling than the general trend is the specific case of Cunard, which inaugurated the first timetabled steamship service across the Atlantic in 1840 and in 2004 sent the world’s largest passenger liner, the Queen Mary 2, to America from Albion, France. The mammoth ship, which has 17 decks and looms 200 feet over the waterline (and is only 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building), made 13 trans-Atlantic crossings in 2004. By the end of 2005, it will have made 26 in the last 12 months.

It bears remembering that the phrase “Getting there is half the fun” began as a Cunard slogan, coined in the heyday of trans-Atlantic shipping in the 1920s and 1930s. Starting in the late 1940s, the original Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary shuttled tens of thousands of passengers across the pond. But in 1959, the first jet flew over it, and video killed the radio star, so to speak. Now, the closest many of us have gotten to a grand ocean liner is gawking at the Queen Mary in its harborside berth in Long Beach, Calif., or peeking at her successor when she docked in New York last year to momentary fanfare. But with a passenger capacity of 2,620 and another big boat on line for 2007 (the Queen Victoria), that situation is already happily changing.

I’d like to think it’s because people are fed up with air travel that Cunard’s bookings are so strong, and surely that factors into the equation. But there’s also the value of paying as little as $1,000 for a six-night crossing that includes (obviously) accommodation, meals, activities, and cultural enrichment programs, not to mention the 20,000-square-foot Canyon Ranch Spa. Among the 10 restaurants on the ship is one recently created by Todd English, the Bostonian chef who provided a compelling reason to fly out of La Guardia when he opened a version of his restaurant Figs there in 2001. When it comes to air travel, not even Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class can touch this. Indeed, the Queen Mary 2 seems to have everything but a Baby Gap and a gay bar on board – but either would fly better at sea than at 35,000 feet.

A reprieve from the anonymity of air travel and its thousand attendant incivilities is just an added bonus to this return to the Golden Age of travel revisited on a grand scale. Count me in. And for the good people who want to legalize cell phone use during flights, I have this message: Walk the plank.