Sunrise, Day 41 (Fort Lauderdale)

Our very active days have us sleeping in a bit more everyday, although it's hard to sleep in very late on turnaround day...the sounds of the ship as it navigates into Port Everglades and spins into position is heard throughout the ship. Our neighbors' cabin doors begin opening and slamming around 6am. So we were awake early, just not motivated to jump out of bed. Instead we found an episode of circa-1961 Bonanza to watch on TCM on our cabin TV (REALLY slim pickings, cruise television programming!!). Finally, there was no delaying it any longer and we headed up to Deck 19 to see all that was going on.
Today is forcasted to be the busiest day in history at Port Everglades, as there is a record number of passengers disembarking and embarking cruise ships today. With most of them flying in and out of Fort Lauderdale, the airport will be an absolute zoo, with standing room only, and then only curbside, not even in the terminal.
How do we know this? Because the busiest day in Port Everglades to date was in December 2003...a day that we were returning from a cruise and flying home. The wait for a taxi was three hours, and we would have missed our flight had G not implored a chartered shuttle van to add "just a few more passengers". We were perched on our luggage, with more luggage on top of us, for the 10 minute ride to the airport. And once there, it was even more chaotic.
That's a huge part of the reason we are staying on for the holidays this year, and not flying home for a couple of weeks as we did last year. Delayed for two hours on the tarmac last year by a heavy thunderstorm, in danger of missing our connecting flight, G looked at me and said, "We are NOT doing this next year."
I guess he meant it.
Although I'm quite sad not to be at home enjoying the holiday with friends, I'm also excited about my first Christmas cruise. We've decided to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of 400+ kids and multi-generational family groups on board. We know there will be kids in the adult hot tubs endless games of Marco-Polo around the pool, elevators arriving with all the buttons pushed, and privacy tags on the door turned to read "refresh my room please".
Pray for us.