the long and winding road...

Homeward Bound! We awoke to find the ship had already docked. Having put our luggage out the night before, we just had to get ready and stuff the last few items into our backpacks before grabbing a bite to eat. Celebrity has lots of opportunities for “professional” photos to be taken throughout the cruise. Not as many, varied or good as those offered by Carnival but still fun. They offered a service where you could pay a single price and get all your photos on a cd. If you planned on buying more than just a few photos, it turned out to be a great deal so we signed up for it on the second night or so. G loves to have her pix done! I mean she really loves it. So each night between dinner and the show, we’d stop by and let her have pix done. Sometimes we joined in, sometimes not. We got lots of very average photos but some of them are pretty great.

The night before disembarkation I got the two CDs, plugged them into the laptop and found that only one of them was working. When I called guest services I was told it was no problem. I should just take the cd down the next morning and the photo people would fix it. So the next morning we leisurely got some breakfast then, about half an hour before our assigned time to leave the ship, we went to the photo area. Closed. By the time they found someone it had been ½ and hour and then it took the guy about 45 mins to fix the problem. We finally got off the ship at about 10am. We still weren’t too stressed. Then we went down and collected our luggage and encountered the world’s longest customs line. Seriously, it was hundreds of people long and it wasn’t moving AT ALL. This was when we started to get a little worried. I calculated that it was going to take us an hour or more, at least, to get through the line. Plus we still needed to taxi to the airport, get through security etc and our plane was leaving at 12:10 pm. What to do?

Urged by another passenger who was standing in line behind us, we walked to the very front of the line and as politely as possible explained the situation and asked if we could go ahead of them. We must have looked and sounded pretty desperate because, even though they had stood in line for an hour, they let us in. Thank goodness!!! I thanked them profusely and we went on our way. As it turned out, we made it to the airport and through security fairly quickly and had about 30 mins to stand around before boarding. There’s no question in my mind that we would have missed our plane if we wouldn’t have cut the line.

After two flights, a short layover and a shuttle ride from the airport, we arrived home about 14 hrs after disembarking the ship. In some ways its nice to be home: my soft bed, my roomy house (ship cabins are small) and my own blowdryer (the one on the ship sucked!) but, honestly, I could have stayed on the ship forever.

OK, back to reality.