travels, races, and other musings

We woke up early. Me, because I was in the wrong time zone. I considered going for a workout, but we had planned to take the nature trail and there’s a long walk down the pier from the ship so I decided that was my workout and I would just skip the gym. We had originally wanted to do a sit down breakfast but we were sitting in the room hungry and ready to go at 7:30 AM so we just went up to Marceline instead because it was open, and sit down wouldn’t open for another 30 minutes.  We returned to the room and finished readying ourselves for the day. I wanted to meet Maleficent at 9:15 so we got in line around 9:05 which was already far, far too late. As long as you were in the line by 9:30, you got to meet her. By 10:45 I was finally meeting her. It was a long wait, but I made friends with the folks in front and behind me and Heather contented herself with taking some photos around a less-busy ship. Maleficent was a fabulous meet and well worth the wait. However, if I had it to do ov...

Travel to Fort Lauderdale and Embarkation Back in July, my friend Heather asked me if I might like to go with her on the maiden voyage of the Disney Destiny in November. It had never even crossed my mind to go on a maiden voyage, but it seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity so I said yes, paid my half of the fare and booked my flights. And so it was that I found myself flying solo to Miami to meet up with her in Fort Lauderdale to embark on a unique voyage.  My flights were uneventful and when I arrived in Miami I jumped onto the Tri Rail to make my way to Fort Lauderdale. The timing of my flight out just worked better for me to travel to Miami. Once in Fort Lauderdale, I grabbed a Lyft to the hotel and met up with Heather and some of the other folks that work at her travel agency (and some of the friends they had brought along with them as well) for dinner. After dinner, we went to our room and organized our belongings for embarkation the following morning. We woke up and t...

Travel Home and Final Thoughts It was an early morning. We got up and got ourselves ready and down the curb for our pickup for our taxi ride to the airport. Our driver was actually running about 5 minutes late but we had enough time built in. Apparently he decided to make up for it with probably one of the craziest taxi rides I’ve ever been on: lane lines were a mere suggestion, as were speed limit signs. At one point I looked at the speedometer and we were going over 130 kph (around 80 mph). Thankfully, we made it in one piece and in record time. The airport was packed even though it was only 5 AM.  However, we were able to get checked in, drop our bags, go through security and find our gate with no issues and in plenty of time. Our flight to Heathrow was on time and we had enough time in Heathrow to go through their whole leave-and-come-back-in-through-security song and dance. We bought around $35 worth of coffee and muffins from the Starbucks in our terminal (I’m not even kiddin...

Disembarkation and Rome We had early seating for dinner on this cruise but had arranged ahead of time to come to second seating for breakfast since we didn’t need to be anywhere. Our server had an open table in his section (often families don’t go to final morning breakfast in the main dining room) so after getting ready and finishing our packing, we went down to Enchanted Garden around 8 AM for breakfast. We finished with breakfast around 9, said our goodbyes to our amazing serving team and went up to the atrium to get in line to get off the ship. The line wasn’t too bad and we were able to walk right off, grab our bags and head outside. There were no customs or passport control. When we walked outside there were people there asking where we were going and I said “train station” and they had us get in line. Last time we were debarking in Civitavecchia , we had to take a shuttle to the front of the port, then walk to a bus stop, then take a city bus to the train station. It wasn’t a bi...