Homeward bound. The cruise is over and it was great! Now comes the long trip home. Up early, disembark the ship, clear U.S. customs, get to the airport, baggage and ticketing, flight time, connections, layover time, more flight time, and finally home on the west coast.
The ship expects your luggage to be packed and outside your cabin on the night before docking back at Miami. This enables the crew to stage luggage by the time of your flight departure (you fill out a form and they give you color coded luggage tags). It's a tough job to get the luggage of 3000+ passengers off the ship and made available at baggage claim and the ship terminal dock.
I was scheduled for a 10:00am disembarking, so at the time I was able to leave the ship and join the very long line of people waiting to clear U.S. Customs. It was 11:00am before I was able to board a bus headed for Miami's airport. Not to rush, however, because my flight was not until 4:00pm. There are only so many flights each day to get me from Miami to Atlanta and then to Reno, Nevada. I was too late for the early morning flight, so I no choice expect to wait for the late afternoon flight.
At any rate, all went according to plan and by evening I was back home. I sorted through the hundreds of photos I took during the cruise and wrote text for a selected subset which you have just viewed. I hope you enjoyed my sharing the trip with you.
Click on any picture to see an enlarged view. Use "back" to return.