The new and improved place to waste your time on the web.

Day 4

June 14, 2009

Location: Back somewhere in the North Atlantic

After 10 hours of international adventuring, Carnival Triumph began its ~550 nautical mile journey back to New York. To make debarkation easier, cruise lines have a “mandatory” assembly notifying passengers of what is going to be happening and how they would get off the ship. Carnival was no different, and everyone was made aware that there would be a debarkation talk at 11 AM. Counter-intuitive as it seems, we had to set an alarm, on vacation, to get up. The weather also became cloudy again and the sea got considerably choppier. Thanks to cell phones not switching back to eastern time (even when we were clearly in the time zone), we got up an hour early. Discovering we had an extra hour before we had to be at the talk, we decided to get breakfast. When that was done, we made our way to the lounge and stopped in the gift shop to take advantage of their inventory clearance sale.

We then made our into the lounge and got a seat. Jorge came out to begin the big debarkation talk. To facilitate the expedience of this process, it’s time for a bulleted list! (This one has facts about the talk and some of Jorge’s comments on them)

• There were 3000 guests on board, only 200 showed up. “On debarkation day, the other 2800 will provide comedy for us.”
• There were 692 kids at the day camp. “The only ones I saw must have been the ones that got away.”
• You are allowed $800 in duty-free stuff. “You and your wife, $1600. The kids are worth $800 each, too!”
• No Cuban cigars are allowed into the U.S. “If you have any, there’s a smoking party out by the funnel.”
• Your kids cannot take your booze and/or cigar(ette)s.
• If you are carrying more than $10,000 in cash or negotiable monetary instruments, you must declare it. “I can get it off the ship, no questions asked for $5000.”
• 1 in 3 people look like they are hiding something when they are coming through customs, and may be randomly checked. “Look to your left. Look to your right. Neither of them look suspicious? Congratulations, YOU will have your bags randomly checked by customs officials!”

Along with other insights and jokes, we learned about the 2 options for debarkation and absorbed information until it was over.

Then, it was time for lunch (hey, we had a small breakfast in anticipation). The taste of the nations was “American” and they even had a “Chocolate Buffet”. The quotations on the chocolate buffet were necessary. I don’t know about you, but when I hear chocolate buffet, I think chocolate candy, chocolate fountains, and other things that are predominantly chocolate. Their version just featured desserts that had chocolate in them, but did not seem super chocolate=y.

After lunch, we just had some time to -sit- before our next activity, the Love & Marriage Game. We got there nice and early, even making sure we were in the front row in the hopes Jorge would come and talk to us/make fun of us. The show started and we found out some sad news, Jorge was feeling under the weather and would not be joining us for the show. The couples were a good representation of married couples: 1 week, 27 years and 34 years. The game was not nearly as entertaining as the Royal Caribbean version. Heck, the one husband didn’t even play, he just said “no comment” to every question. They asked some questions, checked if the answers matched and that was about it. No score was kept, and they didn’t even ask the whoopee question the right way (how else is it embarrassing then?).

Later, we shared our last dinner with our friends. The food was still good, but some of it seemed lacking that night, and the service was a little slow. But we were still extremely happy with our waitstaff, Albert and Cha Cha. They took a picture of our table before we parted ways for the evening on our last night aboard. That evening’s show was “The Big Easy,” centered around the culture of New Orleans and the general Bayou area. Along with several songs involving rivers, like “Proud Mary” and “Take Me to the River”, there were many feelgood hits of the 50s, 60s and 70s. That show also spent more on effects in a show than some community theatres do in a year. There were flashpots, jets of flame, sparklers, a flight rig and the finale had all kinds of additional craziness going on. It is simply to crazy to illustrate here, so you will have to imagine it.

After being thoroughly entertained, we stopped on last time at the photo gallery to check our pictures from the previous evening and threw all of those out. We also took advantage of the ability to print our own pictures on the ship at a decent price. The confirmation for the photos said that we would be able to pick them up after 9 PM the next day, which would obviously be a problem since we would be gone more than 12 hours before that. We asked the customer service representative and he let us know they would be ready by 7 AM. We were relieved that we could purchase our pictures in a timely manner, and chose to call it a night in preparation for another early day to follow.

We retired to our state room, finished watching Twilight (which we had been watching all day during down time), and packed up our stuff so we would be ready to go in the morning. As the sun set (several hours before) on our last day at sea, and the last full day of vacation, we tucked ourselves in and turned out the light.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of my vacation recap!