It seemed to take forever for August to come and the vacation to begin. And then it starts, and “boom” the vacation is over. Big Sigh. So today is the last day of the trip. Last night we had to have our luggage packed and outside our cabin doors by midnight – this allows the crew ample time to get the luggage for 3,800 passengers down to the lower levels, taken off the ship, and placed in a color-coded storage area. We kept just the stuff we needed for today.
We had to get up crazy early to take showers, get dressed, pack up the carry-on luggage, and vacate our rooms by 8am. While it is a hassle to deal with the carry-on luggage (which included my laptop in another bag) for the rest of the day, the ship will have another pile of passengers boarding later today, and there’s no time to get the cabins cleaned if all the passengers don’t get out of the rooms.
Caitlin and I met up with Sharon and Mark, and headed up (with our bags O stuff) to the breakfast buffet. Everybody in the world was there, doing the same thing. In hindsight, this would have been the perfect day to get breakfast in the Main Dining Room, which I never did get to do. Next time…
After breakfast, we needed to find someplace to park ourselves until it was time to leave the ship. The night before we all received disembarkation Group Numbers, in order of people’s airline departure times, with instructions of what we were supposed to do. All the usual places were filled, so we headed down to the Lyric Theatre on Decks 3 and 4, which only had a dozen other passengers in it. The chairs there were very comfortable, so we all sprawled out and got ready to wait. I was extremely congested and borderline miserable by then, so I just half-snoozed. I think everyone else was reading books. Finally our Group Number was called, and we got in the Really Big Line to get off the ship.
Once you got in the line, it moved at a decent speed. Somehow Caitlin and I got in hundreds of people ahead of Sharon and Mark (we thought they were right behind us), so after “punching out” of the ship, we waited for them on the deck – which was shady – until they made it out too. Then down the gangway to a very large room that had luggage lined up everywhere. It took a little while, then we found all of our bags and followed the porter to the American Airlines counter, where we dropped them off. Caitlin and I also chose to check the carry-on bag for the route home, so we had a little less to carry during the day. By now, it was somewhere around 10 or 10:30 in the morning.
In hindsight, once again, we would have been better off in swimsuits by the ship’s pools for a few hours, because after we dropped the luggage, we had to wait in line for 40 minutes to get a taxi downtown. A helpful person at the docks told us that we could check our other bags at the Barra Chino restaurant in Old San Juan, so that’s where we went next. It had become cloudy, and rain was threatening.
After getting rid of that armload of carry-on luggage and laptop computers, we started to wander around the streets of Old San Juan. We meandered around a grocery store for a while (where Sharon purchased some Oreo-like sandwich cookies carrying a “Bimbo” brand name), then sat around in this park for a while. There were hundreds of pigeons, all completely unafraid of the people around them.
