Day 46 - 01/04 - At Sea to Fort Lauderdale

Today is the last day of our cruise and we awoke to our phone alarms in order to attend Ian's coffee chat with himself. Afterwards he did a repeat of the HAL history which was recorded for use in showing to employees. It's a compelling story. He then presented a combination presentation on the Secret Language of Ships and The Bridge Talk.  

After lunch with Larry we attended the Ask the Captain and then did the dreaded last act of all cruises: we packed. At 5:30pm Ian hosted a Q&A with the Lincoln Center Stage Performers. We then ate our final Lido dinner with Larry before attending the variety show with the poor comic (Patrick Keane) and the excellent impressionist (Robbie Howard). After the show we went up to the very windy open deck 9 (deck 3 was closed) and could see 3 other ships headed our direction towards Ft.Lauderdale like swallows returning to Capistrano. I brought up the Cruisemapper.com app and noted many cruise ships headed north and many heading out with their passengers full of expectation about the start of their cruise. The ship with the longest itinerary was probably the Amsterdam which was starting its 2020 Grand World Cruise.

We did our final packing and set out our luggage and said our goodbyes to our stateroom attendants, Chandra and Randi. It appears we may not fly out until Monday as the flights on Sunday are pretty full and we fly standby. But first, we'll take a HAL airboat excursion & airport transfer. We're scheduled to berth at Terminal 4.

It's been another wonderful trip with some adventure thrown in for good measure. It certainly revived an interest in revisiting the Caribbean. Our next planned cruise is scheduled for mid April on the Maasdam out of San Diego to Mexico and ending in Vancouver, BC. I'll do a daily blog on that cruise as well. Thanks for following along. If you want to reach me, send me a message through the blog by posting a comment.

Tim

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