Day 107: Fort Lauderdale (turnaround day), in brief

I had an entire post prepared for turnaround day (which was actually yesterday) and it would not format correctly regardless of everything I did to correct it. In my frustration, I simply deleted it and decided to try again today (the next day). I can actually shorten the day down to a few sentences:

We were awakened early due to the shaking and shimmy-ing of the ship as it docked at Pier 2 in Port Everglades. 

We ate breakfast separately, G in the Horizon Court Buffet and me a little later in the Botticelli Dining Room. 

I took the time during breakfast to complete the survey Princess emailed us for the last two cruises (while the minibars arrive fast and furiously, so do the post-cruise surveys). 

Though the day was brightly sunny, it was also very windy and cool. We decided to stay on board as there was nothing we really needed to do in Fort Lauderdale. 

Disembarkation was significantly delayed due to deficient immigration manning. The last passengers walked off at 11:15am. Immigration came on board for the in transit passengers, and it was 11:50am before that process was complete. Minutes later, the flow of embarking passengers began. 

We ate lunch in the DaVinci Dining Room (salmon and a glass of wine for me). 

We spent most of the afternoon making phone calls and interneting in either Adagio or Skywalkers, the two quietest places on turnaround days. 

The Emerald Princess was the third of six ships to sail. It was cold and extremely windy on the Terrace Deck as we sailed, but we popped the cork on a bottle of Barefoot Bubbly and, holding tightly onto our glasses in the wind, toasted our tenth sailaway of the season. 

After dinner in the Michelangelo Dining Room, we skipped the Welcome Aboard show with comedian Al Katz and instead sat in the Piazza drinking coffee and listening to Ryszard Sulek playing classical music on the piano and generally missing Suzan and Greg very much. :-(

Visual aids for planning our seating choice around the Calypso Pool for the playoff games on MUTS ;-)

An acrobat from Reflex Duo performed in the Piazza at 7:45pm, and, for once, we had front row seats. He was amazingly entertaining, doing all sorts of balance tricks using a very large hoops (how in the world does he fly with that thing??). 

We went to bed and I fought my blog post, wasting 30 minutes of Internet to no avail. 

I mentally prepared myself for a Broncos loss today. To loosely paraphrase Shakepeare...if we're going to lose, let's lose this week, instead of in two weeks. 

It's going to be an emotional day.