Thursday, February 9, 2012

Day 94: Antigua



I was up early and was one of the first off the ship. I walked along the waterfront to Redcliffe Quay, home of the Big Banana restaurant and its ever-dependable free WiFi. I needed to online to purchase Early Bird Check-In for our Southwest flights a week from today (weep!!).

We had held off doing this because we really weren't sure of our plans until the last couple of weeks. Now it looks pretty certain-we're going home next week- and we thought it was worth the extra $10 per person to have priority boarding AND not have to check in online 24 hours ahead of our flight. However, it was not worth burning through our limited Internet time on the ship to do it until today. Luckily, the Southwest iPhone app allowed me to do it from my iPhone.

I never fail to be amazed by this little "phone" in my hand. We've paid all our bills, renewed license plates, placed a drugstore.com order, put library books on reserve, monitored our home remotely, tracked packages, read the news, played games while waiting for shows to start, downloaded maps which have allowed us to hike all over these islands, used the GPS to track our progress, deposited checks into our bank accounts, listened to music and audiobooks, watched TV shows, read magazines and books, taken every photo I've posted on this blog and a couple thousand more, typed every word I've written on this blog and posted from it...all from this one thing I'm holding. What an age we live in!!!

OK, I digressed for a moment, but it is kind of amazing to me just how easy it's all been. The hard part was setting it all up before we left home, and mostly G but me, too, to a lesser degree, spent months doing that.

I was surprised to see a Costa ship, the Luminosa, coming into port right after us. Every person from our ship that I heard said, "Oh-oh" as soon as they saw it. Like the Titanic, I'm sure the Costa Concordia has written its story on the pages of history for centuries to come. The Luminosa originated in Guadeloupe, and we didn't hear a single English-speaking passenger come off of it. They all had the opportunity to cancel their cruise for a full refund, but didn't. Gotta give them credit for that.


Emerald passengers were stopped on the pier while the Luminosa was setting its lines in place. It was nice to have an up close view of that whole process from pier level.


Lines crossed in place, the two ships made a canyon on the pier.