It's almost 2 am, and once again this year we're safely tucked away at the La Quinta near the Fort Lauderdale airport. It's been a hectic and emotional 24 hours (I love cruising, but I hate leaving home), but it helped that we again resisted the urge to book an early flight that would have had us leaving the house before sunrise and instead flew out later in the day.
Unfortunately, our flight was delayed and then delayed again as the weather turned increasingly yucky. We knew we were pushing up against the 1am cutoff of La Quinta's free airport shuttle. When the weather worsened and de-icing was required, we resigned ourselves to paying for a taxi to make the transfer. In the end, we barely made it, but we did make it. We've just arrived, exhausted but content in the knowledge that WE'RE HERE!!
Our Southwest flight itself was as pleasurable as flying can be stuck in a middle coach class seat: free drink coupons (and a screw up yielded an extra Chardonnay), snacks and free Direct TV. I chose NFL Network hoping for updates on tonight's game (no luck) since ESPN wasn't an option (and saw, for the first time, that Robin Williams' Snickers commercial urging his team to win one for Mother Russia- LOL on an airplane gets you some attention!). We could have watched the World Series but- yawn- baseball's not my game. I followed it up with an episode of Law and Order I'd never seen (not surprisingly) and then news from NYC hoping to catch a score, and, finally, the Tonight Show. The men on either side of me snored while their iPhone screens continued to play their TV shows of choice (it felt comfortingly familiar). In the end, the triple hit of exhaustion, three glasses of Chardonnay and the opportunity to actually sit and watch TV worked their magic; I'm as relaxed tonight as I've been since, oh, last March 8th or so.
I'll let you in on a secret...we actually had flights booked to come down here on November 2nd and November 9th too. We've been through this before, where something (me, pneumonia, hospitalization) came up at the eleventh hour, nearly forcing us to postpone our trip, and Southwest's very user-friendly rewards program lets us book and then cancel flights with impunity. I tried cancelling them from the plane, but the WiFi was about as fast as what we've been prepared to expect on the Royal Princess (we've heard it's horrendous). So, as much as I hated to do it, I set up a last "to-do" for tomorrow morning, to cancel the flights before we board the ship (and the post-flight hotel nights we had booked too).
We've been spending pre-cruise nights at the La Quinta near the Fort Lauderdale airport for 10 years now, still courtesy of the year G lived in an LQ in El Paso, TX in the military. It's not fancy, but, for a late arrival (and 1:30am was pretty late), it's really perfect. I phoned the hotel when our flight was delayed, and they advised that we call as soon as we landed, pushing that 1am transfer shut down as we were. I did that, and then phoned again after we collected our luggage. We know exactly where to go to catch the shuttle, which is good, as we were on auto-pilot by this point. Thankfully, this year we weren't assigned a room at the very end of a thickly carpeted hallway...we only had to wrestle our luggage down five doors. And wrestling was required; we've maximized our luggage allowance once again (our four checked bags were publically weighed in and stamped 49, 47, 44 and 44 pounds. Yay us!).
We can't help but be conspicuous tomorrow morning- something tells me we'll be the only couple getting on the Royal Princess for a 5-night cruise with almost 200 pounds of suitcases, two roll aboards and a backpack. :-o We've decided we can't really unpack on the Royal -we'd be finishing up about the time the ship returns to Port Everglades- and have tried to pack with that in mind, hoping to minimize our forays into the large bags.
Right...
Too tired to type any longer...night night!