Sea Day 18 – Last Day of the Cruise

Today is the last sea day, and also the last day of the cruise.  We will arrive in the port of Los Angeles early tomorrow (Saturday) morning.

This morning was a repeat of yesterday morning, cool with overcast skies.

On Wednesday night, we passed a milestone for our cruising history, exceeding our previous “record” for consecutive sea days.  We believe the previous record was 6 consecutive sea days for one of the Transatlantic crossing cruises we did.  This trip set a new record at 8 consecutive sea days.

Today will be spent packing up our belongings, and trying to get it all in the suitcases again.  The biggest issue will be the weight, we are trying to see if we can borrow a luggage scale to make sure we do not exceed the 50 lb. limit imposed by the airlines for the checked bags.

Since we are getting off of the ship in the “carry off”  program, we do not have to have the bags packed and outside of the cabin tonight, so we have a little extra time, if needed, to get our luggage packed correctly.  The carry off  program is for anyone who can get their luggage off without assistance, and you can leave the ship earlier instead of waiting until your color coded tag is called for the general scheduled disembarkation.

We have reservations tomorrow morning  on another Super Shuttle for the ride to the Los Angeles Airport.  This one should be a direct route to the airport since most of the passengers are heading there.  Hopefully, we will not get another sightseeing trip into Long Beach on the way like we did when we arrived.

Since it was cloudy and cool all day, we mostly spent time packing our luggage, trying to get everything back in the way we had it to fly out here.  We will be leaving some items behind, a couple of pairs of beach shoes that we will give to Georgina, our waiter, and some broken down formal shoes that will not be going back home.

Stephanie was under the weather most of the day, we are not sure why.  It may have been something she ate last night, or just general illness due to the duration of traveling.  We both have had bouts of something this week, maybe it is some fallout from the Bora Bora food, maybe we should not have eaten some of the items, like the raw fish marinated in lime & coconut juices to “cook” it.

The temperature was in the low 60’s, so no one was outside again today, once more causing most of the interior areas on the ship to be crowded, including the buffet tables that passengers now seem to want to use for game tables, making it difficult to get a table for eating.

We were able to borrow a luggage scale from our cabin steward, Edgardo, and weighed our bags.  However, we still had not completed packing, so it was only a relative measurement.  Both of the large suitcases were still below the weight limit of 50 lbs.  Hopefully, we will be able to use the scale again tomorrow morning when we finish packing.

We got dressed to go to dinner in the dining room, but we did not intend to actually stay and eat there, Stephanie was just not up to it.  However, we wanted to give some additional tips to our wait staff, and this was the final opportunity to see them.  We headed to the dinning room, and told our wait staff goodbye, and gave them some additional tip money for treating us so well during the cruise.   We then headed to the buffet to get some food to go.  We had not even looked at the dining room menu, but based on the food being served in the buffet, it was obviously a good dinner, there were split crab legs, and also carved to order prime rib.  I took a big plate of crab legs and a nice slice of prime rib back to the room, and ate it with the last of our red wine.  Stephanie had a roll and some mashed potatoes, which was all she could “stomach” tonight.

We watched some of the President’s Cup golf tournament on TV before going to sleep.  We have an early morning tomorrow, the ship is due to dock at 6:00 AM.  We still will have to do the last bit of packing and get some breakfast at the buffet before heading to the Club Fusion Lounge at 8:05 AM for our Disembarkation.