Cruise Number 4 Begins

Cruise number three is finished and cruise four is about to begin. They do the cruises in reverse order so we begin this cruise with 2 sea days and then the ports. Already we have a different attitude about this one. Before it has been an attitude of  “Oh Well , if we don’t do it this cruise we can do it on the next one”.

Now we are thinking , “we haven’t done this yet so we had better do it now”. For example they have an ice cream bar on the ships and we usually stop there at least once, but we had not done it even once yet so we did it yesterday. The same was true of a visit to a hot tub. We usually go often but up until last evening we hadn’t even gone once. We will have to take in a movie also because we haven’t done that yet either.

 We are finding it hard to believe that we have been here for 30 days and only have 10 days left to enjoy. At ten thirty we  had to go to the Da Vinci dining room with old cards and new cards and pass ports in hand. We were escorted off of the ship and through customs and back on again. Last time we did a shore excursion in Fort Lauderdale but this time we could not think of something we wanted to do so we  just stayed on board. It was cool and threatening to rain so I guess it was just as well that we did not go ashore.

Because of US immigration everyone has to take their passport, leave the ship go through immigration and when the count is Zero meaning that everyone is off of the ship, then and only then can we return to the ship. There were approximately 300 people who were staying on and had to go through this procedure. We had to wait in that holding area waiting for 13 people. It appeared to be families travelling together. They had not disembarked and the hunt was on to find them. We were delayed more than an hour because they did not follow directions. I guess they figured that the rules applied to everyone else but not to them. Finally we are back on board with our new room key activated.

Let cruise number 4 begin!!!.