Cruise Day 12: Disembarkation

Here we are in our last hours of the cruise. It's a short day, since we disembark right after breakfast and we've said as many goodbyes last night already as we hoped to do. Our bags are packed and set out, collected already, except one backpack and our laptops. We stayed out late dancing, then stayed up later packing up the few tidbits that tend to wait until the last minute, and now we're off to our final breakfast.
May 26, 2010

Here we are in our last hours of the cruise. It's a short day, since we disembark right after breakfast and we've said as many goodbyes last night already as we hoped to do. Our bags are packed and set out, collected already, except one backpack and our laptops. We stayed out late dancing, then stayed up later packing up the few tidbits that tend to wait until the last minute, and now we're off to our final breakfast.

We're at Lumiere's again, though that doesn't really make a difference since each night the menu is the same at all restaurants except on the three specific theme days early in the cruise, and it's certainly the case the everyone's getting the same breakfast this morning. Since we have the late dinner, we get the late breakfast, at 8:00 am. Early diners have to be at breakfast by 6:45 and then out in an hour so they can clean up for our arrival.

I ordered more granola and yogurt with fruit. It's taken me this long but I'm finally able to get near enough to what I want without being calculatingly difficult. Ryan has an omlette. We both have grapefruit juice.

We say goodbye to our dinner mates and our servers, and our neighbors, Mike and Michelle and Collin and Shane, and Tracy, their tablemate with her husband and their son Hunter. We wave to Evan and his sister Jennah (with an h, then? I've been spelling it without), and her boyfriend Chris, and their parents. We don't see anyone else that we know, I think. Not Daniel or Peter, who have the late seating with us but in a different restaurant, nor Kia and her family, who also have a different rotation of the late seating.

Our table 12, from Cruise 2010 - On the boat

Mike and Michelle's table, from Cruise 2010 - On the boat

Evan, Jennah, and Chris, from Cruise 2010 - On the boat

Breakfast is over and we're getting our bags and walking off the cruise. It's easy to disembark, even though we toyed briefly with the idea of finding room on the next one, because it was so much fun, even though it would be different with different people and no longer a new experience, and being a 10-day cruise without the extra middle day at sea. But we never know when our next adventure is going to turn out to be fun or a disaster, because of weather, or cost, or some other unexpected factor. In the end, though, there was no room, and it would probably have been too expensive (more than the discounted rate we'd gotten on this one), and anyway, the point for this world trip is to keep trying out new things, so we're happy to stick to our plan.

I can say that the next place we've gone to, along the southern coast of France, has turned out to be as much fun as the cruise. We're at a campsite with a beautiful river and all sorts of fun and friendly people around, and we're already thinking in our heads how next year we need to have a whole month off in May and June so we can take another cruise and go camping in the south of France again, right after. Anyway, so we're having a good time.

After this, I'm hoping we'll jump back in time again to Christmas Eve, 2009, in Sydney, Australia. We were expecting warm, summery weather (it's mid-summer there at that time), but instead when we arrive, we're greeted with cold rain and grey skies. It does get better, for a bit, but rain will be the theme for the next several months, pretty much up until this cruise. I hope I can pick out the better parts to write about, since there were some, interspersed with the plague of rain that made for a chilly, disappointing (weather-wise, at least) summer.