Moreover, it's the last impression you have of the ship, the last thoughts you'll have of the cruise line, and so it is important because last impressions, just like first impressions, are lasting.
Leaving the Star Princess wasn't that memorable, which I think is a good thing.
We woke up when the ship docked. No movement. Cell phone access!
We had nothing with us but a few tote bags and our computer cases, because they pick up your luggage (and screen it) the night before. So getting out would be easy. I called mom and dad, gave them an estimated time of 9am, and we went and got our last breakfast.
Then we sat in the room and watched those with higher priority disembark. These included those who could carry all their luggage without assistance, who got off first at about 7:40 (scheduled; 8:10 or so actual), those who had tight flight connections arranged through Princess, and those on the higher decks. Since we were on the B deck (Baja, which means lower, though of course it was the second highest full passenger deck), we had decent priority.
For some reason, Princess had a lot of confusing colors (like blue and turquoise) for different priorities. Silly.
We leaned out the window and took pictures. Everyone else seemed to, too.
Finally, it was the time we were supposd to leave the room.
I took one more shot of Marjorie before, though. It was the "maximum relaxation" moment.
Cristian sort of said good bye and clearly understood he was getting no extra tip. I wish him well in his future endeavors, and hope he leaves the service industry.
We were supposed to sit in the Princess Theater after leaving our rooms, but when we got there, we realized there were only a few others in the theater, so everyone must have been going to the assigned disembarkation points early, or else not leaving their rooms. We saw a couple we knew and said good bye to them, and then went to our designated point, which was one of the lounges. No seats there.
Disembarkation was going slowly, and I contemplated calling mom and telling her to leave Delray Beach a bit later, but decided to chance it.
Finally, we got the signal to go.
Somewhere on the way out, my bag got caught on a step, and I lost some stuff as the outside pocket ripped open. It had been a great bag that had cost me only $20, but the stuff I lost (not including any pictures or work files) can't be replaced. Damn.
You hand over your cruise card as you leave the ship, and that is that.
It was pretty easy to find our bags, though hard of course to carry them, since they were filled to the brim and there were so many of them. Nonetheless, we got in the line for American citizens, not realizing we wouldn't even have to show our passports.
And there at the end was Joe Btfsplk again. Only he was wearing a Princess shirt and hat, and was helping people to disembark. So all this time, he'd been holding out on us. He worked for the cruise line! He had a very sheepish look on his face. It was illegal to take a picture of him, so I hope the TSA isn't on my case for this one.
Not to mention the Al Capp estate. But we can counterclaim for the use of the "How Far is a Goldfarb?" series. You have to scroll down a bit to get it.
Keeping up our joke, he suggested it was likely a hurricane was going to hit.
Oddly, the second we got outside, it started to pour, the first rain we'd seen since the Sunday morning in Rome. Luckily, there is a big overhang over the area where you wait, so we didn't get rained on.
It was 9:00 am exactly when we got outside.
I called mom, and it turned out that she had heard me wrong. She thought I had said 9:30 and they were just barely out of Delray Beach. I told her no problem (we were very relaxed) and we found seats on a bench and watched the people rushing off.
One thing I love is that Princess tries really hard to get folks who are flying from Fort Lauderdale to buy transfers from them. They claim that there are few cabs at the cruise port, which wasn't true at all, and they don't tell you that the airport is at most a five buck cab ride from the cruise port. This was rather obvious as had seen the planes approaching the airport from the ship.
We saw a bunch of people we knew as we were waiting, helping a few with bags, and then mom called and said they were there. It was really chaotic, what with security people trying to make sure you didn't block the passages, but we finally got the bags in. This is when I found out the bag had ripped. Oh, well.
It was great seeing mom and dad, and great just being back in the States and back where you could actually buy things.
We had two things we wanted to do:
Eat hamburgers and go bookshopping.
It was four days before Christmas, so mom and dad were not excited about going shopping at all.
We had lunch at a hamburger place we had been to before, with an airplane motif. The burgers on the ship had been--generously--inedible, so it was the first burger in weeks (my last one had been at Alonso's in Baltimore with Phil, I'm not sure when Marjorie's was).
And birch beer! This restaurant had fountain birch beer, which made up for the lack of same in Philadelphia. First fountain pop I'd had since the 7-11 in Philly.
We went to both Borders (where we used a 30% off coupon to buy a gift for Phil) and Barnes & Noble. Little things like fresh-squeezed orange juice and a choice of apples at Whole Foods were exciting us.
And being able to watch what we wanted on tv.
And being able to just go somewhere without worry about time or place. It was nice.
We had expressly requested potato latkes for dinner, since we had missed them at Chanukah (for some reason, the ship gave us what they called latkes a couple of days before disembarkation, but they were--charitably--inedible).
Here's mom in her apron.
She was following instructions not to stop smiling til I told her she could.
Mom had emailed me the day before asking if we would be okay with our cousin Alan Sorin coming for latkes. Alan is my father's only first cousin on his mother's side, someone I've looked up to my whole life and, because he'd lived his whole life in New York, someone I hadn't exactly seen enough of. So the answer was of course yes.
Alan's wife Audrey had died just six weeks earlier. They had moved to Florida about a year before, and their house was still in the process of being built (I'm not going to go into some of the details on the internet, but it made the Money Pit look like a routine, smooth transaction). But it was simply marvelous to see Alan, and particularly for Marjorie who had not seen him in years. Plus, most of the times we'd seen him recently were at things like my dad's birthdays and his daughter Abbe's wedding, which is to say at times when we all had other things taking up our attention. I'm afraid the last time I really had this much of Alan, as silly as it sounds, was when we went to the New York World's Fair. In 1965. When I was 8.
So this was special.
There was some discussion about the Sorin nose, and who had it.
Dad and Alan: same nose.
Alan and me, not so much.
Later I put the shots together so the noses knew.
It took a couple of hours to Photoshop these together.
Then Alan suggested using a timer to get all of us in the same shot. And dad brings out the manual to his camera.
If you remember from ages ago, my camera started going on the fritz in Spain. And dad's camera is the exact same model as mine (David had liked it at Emily's graduation from high school last year, so that's what he bought dad for his 80th birthday). So I not only learned how to take a timed shot, I was able to get the camera back to working better!
This was the original picture.
Then I deleted all the unnecessary detail.
Then Marjorie went and added a cute green background.
As you can see, a fine time was had by all.
And we slept like logs.
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