coming home

We went down to dinner armed with our pre paid gratuity vouchers, what got me was that in the blurb with the vouchers it said that you can add some cash too if you have found that the service was excellent - surely the point of pre paying was that you didnt have to add more money to their tips! Ok we did buy our waiters a little present each too of a watch set - they were reduced from $80 down to $20 - and I wrapped them up in napkins from the all you can eat cafe (for that touch of added class ;o)).

We had to have our suitcases packed and left outside our stateroom by midnight at the latest (so the luggage could be sorted and ready for you to collect after leaving the ship), so after having our meal we packed up our suitcases.

The combination of change in transatlantic travel allowances (we were allowed two checked in bags each but now were only allowed one each), and all of the clothes that we had to pack for the cruise meant that we both had trouble shutting our cases. Royal Caribbeans version of casual is not the same as ours!

We didnt even have room to put our booze in the suitcases!

When we came back from having our final holiday cocktails we found a note under our door saying that they would be coming into our stateroom at 8.30 am to carry out maintenance on our balcony. We decided to make sure that we would have our hand luggage packed and take it with us when we went down to breakfast.

The next morning we got up had a shower each and packed up our hand luggage, mine was ok as all it had in it was money and essential stuff like that, James' on the other had weighed an absolute ton...

...in the library on the ship they had a book exchange shelf, and every day he would go down there and would see what he could cadge, he had a collection of around 10 (he says there were 10 but I think it was more than that) books by our last day (all paper backs) and he saw what he could fit in his ruck sack (he managed to fit them all in there).

We went up to breakfast (I always want to say down to breakfast but the buffet place was on deck 11) with our bags...

...I had decided the night before that I wanted to recreate Elvis' fools gold sandwich, we saw some of the tables had napkins already on them with the cutlery inside, we went to sit down on one table and this lady came running over with an overflowing plate of food because we were about to take her table! She should have placed her jacket on her chair (as per the international rule of "savesees") to show that that table had been taken.

Anyhow I went around the different stations collecting the different components for my sandwich...

toast check; individual tub of peanut butter check; pile of bacon check; banana - I couldnt find any bananas! What was I going to do? I told James that I couldnt find any bananas (I even had another look around the whole place just in case they had magically appeared but no) he couldnt find any either and even asked one of the waiters where the bananas were - and he said that they had ran out - HOW CAN THEY RUN OUT OF BANANAS?

I wasnt going to let a small technicality going to ruin my unhealthy breakfast so I substituted the banana for canned peaches - I think The King would have approved - which is more than I can say for my Mum - she would have been horrified ;o). The sandwich itself worked but my tummy really hurt afterwards!

I even got a couple of goodbye hugs, one from our stateroom attendant and one from a waitress who called me her favourite English lady (I felt really bad that I didnt have any spare vouchers to tip her - ok not bad enough to part with any hard cash but you know what I mean).

After breakfast we made our way down to the waiting place for disembarking the ship (as I said we were one of the first groups to leave the ship), so we go in there and the place is packed - we find a couple of seats at the back and sit down. A few minutes later we hear some mumbling but cant make out what the guy is saying, so I walk down the front and then he calls out our number, so I run back to where James is to let him know that we can go and we make our way off of the ship (we use the stairs as all of the old dears are waiting for the elevators), we get off of the ship, find our suitcases as per our colour coded area and then go through immigration, I get through ok and James gets the usual looking at him and then his passport several times (he lost 10 stone/140 pounds), before they decide that it is him.

We find our coach get on there and are raring to go...

...only there is only one other couple on the coach - surely the other people will be arriving imminently...

...after half an hour James was getting impatient and asked the coach driver how long we were going to wait - and he says it could take another 2 hours for our fellow passengers to get off of the ship. At this point we were thinking "this cant be right surely they would have us all leaving the ship at the same time"...

...another half an hour went by and James asked to see the itinerary (by this time it was 10.45 am) and it said that we would arrive at the hotel by 11am, James then said to to the driver "look it says here that we arrive at the hotel at 11am" and he says "its just a guide we have to wait for the other passengers" that was like a red rag to a bull.

James then went off of the coach to ask a Royal Caribbean Rep why we are having to wait for the others passengers and why they are saying that we will be back at the hotel at 11am when we are nowhere near likely to get there by that time.

He went to talk to the rep, but a security guard grabbed him by the arm and asked him why he wanted to talk to the rep, he explained the situation and was told that she wont be able to help him.

So he was walking back and another rep came upto him to ask if he needed any help, and when he explained about "waiting on the coach etc" her whole expression changed and she walked off.

James then came back to the coach defeated...

...we were talking to the people who had fast tracked their getting off of the ship (they took their own luggage off of the ship thus eliminating having to wait for their luggage having to be offloaded in batches), and they said that this was the worst part of the cruise. I couldnt believe my ears - they were saying that this is what normally happens!

I suppose once you get past a certain age (retirement is my current guess) that you have so much free time that you really dont care about having to wait for other people for god knows how many hours. We are not at that age yet, and I dont think that we ever will!

Anyhow an hour later our fellow passengers start to emerge (at about 12.30 pm - an hour and a half after we were supposed to be back at the hotel) and get onto the coach and they were happily cooing about how well organised the disembarking the ship was, I on the other hand was seething!

We eventually get to the hotel, I rush off of the coach (whilst James collects our luggage) am second in line, I get served and I give them my name and saying that I am with the Royal Caribbean party and ask if there is anything waiting for me, I get told no! meanwhile my fellow passengers are handing over their vouchers (I told you they would appear again), and getting keycards to a dayroom! I then barge to the front of the queue and ask the other person on reception what "the other people are getting" and she says their dayrooms so I say "what about me I dont have a voucher" and she says "have you already got a room?" and already majorly p1ssed off I say "so how am I supposed to already have a room then?" she then swipes some cards and hands them over to me. I go to ask if they are for an individual room or a communal one and she cuts me off saying "the elevators are at the back".

I was extremely angry at this point and wanted to hand back the cards because I didnt want to stay there a minute longer - I said to her "I want to hand back the cards because I dont need the dayroom" and she just said "leave them there I cant help you at the moment because I am helping these people" In her defence there was a line of about 15 people behind me at that point, I had a good mind to take the keycards with me and to leave them at the airport!, but I didnt I just left them on the side.

I get out and find James just staring at the coach driver, so I ask him what he is doing and he says "I am thinking all of the things that I am going to do to him if I see him again"! I said to him that it wasnt his fault...

I then tell him that I dont want to hang about anymore and for us just to go straight to the airport (I was THAT angry), so we get on the shuttle bus expecting to have to catch the airtrain back to the terminal, LOL the shuttle driver could obviously tell how angry we were by taking us straight to the terminal.

We find the BA check in desk, and it says that it wont open until 3pm it was about 1.15pm at that point, so James went off to forage for the foodcourts (I think he could tell that I was in no mood to go looking), he found where they were and got my self a burrito, it was ok but difficult to eat with plastic cutlery. After eating my lunch I had a look in the only other shop before check in and treated myself to an NYPD t-shirt (oohh NYPD do podcasts - I will see about getting these next time I reload ;o)).

At about 2.30 we make our way back to the check in area James gets himself a coffee from Dunkin Donuts, I know that there was a Starbucks around from when we arrived, so I went off in search of it for my final pumpkin spice latte.

At about 2.50 a hard faced check in lady appears and calls us over because we were first in line, we hand over our passports and tell her that we would like an aisle seat and the one next to it (she eventually understands what we want after thinking that we wanted to aisle seats), she then asks us to put our suitcases on the scale, I put my one on and the scale starts flashing! Oh no my suitcase is 23.4kg/51lbs the limit is 23kg/50lbs I am barely a pound overweight, she just says that the weight limit is 23kg (I am sure if we had been rude then she would have charged us for excess baggage - I know that I would have), James put his suitcase on and it was 22kg - so his was just in weight.

So we go through passport control, we have to get our hand luggage scanned James takes out the tube of toothpaste and puts it in the little bag (for them to put through the scanner separately), James puts his bag through and we are aware that they are putting and then reversing and putting his bag through again...

...they then take his bag over to a side table and put on a pair of latex gloves to go through his ruck sack, meanwhile James had another carrier bag contains a toy rubber baseball bat and a ball in a blister pack, they go to grab that and I say "its just a childs toy" and they take that and my ruck sack over to the same side table and James says to them that we are together. They are then delving (with latex gloved hands) through James' ruck sack bypass the books and remove the cardboard box containing the bottle of crystal head vodka, they then say to him you cant take that onto the plane, and they are then delving into my bag and remove the bottle of rum, that we bought duty free on the ship. It never even crossed my teeny tiny little mind that sealed bottles of booze would fall into this category. The nice lady who scanned our bags asked if there was anyway that we could check the bottles of drink in another bag as excess luggage, we said no and that the price of the excess luggage would be too prohibitive. Someone was going to have a good night...

We were sitting in departures and the nice lady who scanned our bags came back with they toy baseball bat and ball and said that we could take that on board after all.

We get on our flight on time and because of a good tailwind, we would have arrived back at Heathrow just before 6am, but because of local regulations we had to circle overhead for 10 minutes.

We landed ok, went to immigration and because James still has a bog standard passport he joined the line to go through and actually speak to an immigration person, just before we got to that point I saw a sign for e-passports, because I have one of these I asked the lady (who was there if you needed any help) if I could go through the e-passport thing and she looked at my passport and said yes. So I walked up there asked the bloke (on hand to help) if I should take of my glasses and he said yes...

...so its my turn I stand on the little yellow footprints, place my passport in the scanner take off my glasses and in an instant it came (luckily it was in big enough writing that I could see without my glasses on) to remove my passport and the gates opened, and I was through...

I waved at James who was still waiting to go through and I made my way to the luggage carousel to wait for our luggage. About 5 minutes later James turned up and said that he watched me go through the iris scanner and my face came up instantly - there was one guy there who the scanner couldnt recognise! I guess mine came up so quickly because it is a fairly recent photo - who knows what it will be like in a few years!

Our luggage turned up and we went to the hotel carpark, find the exit put our card in teh machine and it says "ticket has expired" so I go back to the hotel reception explain what happened and got another card...

...we got home and I flopped into bed while James was good and did his unpacking, I finally faced doing mine a few days later...