This one is less a story and more a public-service announcement, so we'll skip the usual jokes. A Louisiana woman on her first-ever Carnival cruise was seriously injured on a rope-swing excursion while visiting Honduras — and the bills that followed are the part every cruiser needs to hear.

According to KTAL NBC 6, Kirsten Lindsey of Shreveport was hurt when a retrieval line on the rope swing snagged as she dropped toward the water; her boyfriend believes the line wasn't attached properly. What she and her partner first thought was a minor injury escalated within hours into something requiring more than 12 hours in the ship's medical center, evacuation to Costa Maya, and ultimately a private medical jet back to Fort Lauderdale.

The tab: over $3,500 in shipboard medical charges and more than $50,000 in ambulance and air-evacuation costs — roughly $53,500 in all, now the subject of a GoFundMe.

The fine print that matters

Here's the uncomfortable truth Carnival spells out plainly in its shore-excursion FAQ: the line is not responsible for injuries during activities off the ship, “whether sold onboard or by third parties ashore.” You take part at your own risk — full stop. That covers tours booked through Carnival and the person selling zip-line tickets fifty feet from the terminal.

So the takeaways for our first-time cruisers: buy real travel insurance with medical-evacuation coverage before you sail, vet the operator before you clip into anything, and understand that a foreign medical emergency can cost more than the entire cruise. It's the least fun thing we'll cover this week, and easily the most important.