Still suffering from a little jet lag we were awake before the sun was up. Once it was a decent hour to get up, I left Garry behind in bed to venture out to pay a visit to Ross Dress for Less. It just didn’t feel right for it to be so close and not to visit.
Well, went there, did that, didn’t buy anything, but at least it was out of my system. By the time I returned, Garry was showered and shaved. Our welcome note said to leave our luggage we wanted to go straight on the ship just inside the door by 9am. With that done we headed to breakfast. With still time to spare I dragged Garry back over to the Harbour shops to check out TJ Max, good choice as we did pick up a couple of tops and shirts… like we needed them … oh well cause we can!
Back in the room and the bags were still there hmm … nearly time to head down stairs…. Do we, don’t we…. I will never judge those guests that we deal with when we are at the Shangri La Hotel… We took our bags downstairs with us instead of worrying if they were going to be picked up.
Ok so this is how they do it. All the bags are collected and placed in a room. Guests then go in and identify that all their bags are there. A sticker is placed on them and your name is checked off. Once all bags are identified and accounted for they are loaded into the bus. Then we are loaded on to the bus.
The ride to the terminal would have been no longer than 5 minutes, but the traffic once in the terminal inflated that time at least three-fold.
We hopped off the bus, but our bags remained and were taken straight to the bag drop off area, hence we didn’t have to deal with any of the insistent road side porters.
Security checks and scanning is done first, which meant we had to join a very long line just to enter the building. Luckily it is all under cover and actually moved quickly considering the amount of people. The check in process went smoothly as well. For the amount of people I felt that we boarded quite quickly.
There was no warm fuzzy “I’m home” feeling as we stepped onto the ship. She is big, and we had absolutely no idea which direction to walk in once we were on board.
We found our room and dropped off our things, nice room but more on that later. Our bags had not arrived so we headed out to explore… With still lots of supplies sitting on the wharf the Captain made an announcement that sail away would be delayed till 5pm. We decided it was just easier to sit out the back and enjoy a drink…. What better way to get me into cruising mode than to order my first Dirty Banana….. Well that went down too easy, so what is left to do …. Buy a second cocktail.
The Captain miscalculated how long it was going to take to get everything on the ship, so sail time was now 6pm. Having made contact with Shaz and Pete, it was decided that we would wait it out on their balcony. And how nice and pleasant was that as we watched the day turn into night. As the rain started to fall so did the lines, so slowly and quietly we pulled away from the dock. After spinning around we then made our way out of the protected port waterways. Our horn blew the melodic love boat tune as we moved out into the open sea heading towards the Caribbean, those in the surrounding apartments rang bells and blew horns in reply. All that is left to say now is “Let the adventure begin”.
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