I got back on the ship and practically floated up to the seventh deck. I promptly ordered a pina colada, a real one with rum this time. After doing the Jets chant from the ship's deck, I took a few minutes to unwind. I stood on the upper deck and snapped photos of the bright orange sunset, the white sailboats floating on the sparkling blue water, and the large crowd of people gathering on the pier. I headed back to my room and changed into a green Jets polo shirt. In the bar, I passed one young guy in a Patriots jersey. All I could do was laugh. We chatted for a minute and I tried to be respectful. My last words to him were "I hope we see you in the playoffs." I played trivia, but bombed it. I guess I should have known sake was made from rice, the pasta whose name means "little turnips" is ravioli, and tennis balls have no stiches.
Dinner was a little sad. Half our group didn't show up, so it felt a little empty. I enjoyed my arancini, tiger shrimp, and New York strip steak though. I tried a sugar free strawberries Romanoff...and I will never eat a sugar free dessert again.
From there, it was back to the large theater for one more show, called Boogie Wonderland. It was more dancing and 70s music, mostly R&B. A lot of Commodores, Abba, and Marvin Gaye. After that was over Carlos, the tour director, had a presentation to thank the entire cruise staff. He also did a countdown: the top ten questions asked on tour. There were such gems as "Is this island completely surrounded by water?" and "Does the ship generate its own electricity?"
There wasn't a whole lot going on for the final evening, so I headed next door into schooner to watch the Giants and Vikings Sunday night game. Never mind the Giants were already done because...you can't spell eliminated without E-L-I.
They also did Michael Jackson trivia in that bar, which I'm glad I didn't do. Of the 14 songs, I would have known maybe 5. As I listened to the song clips it struck me how creative and weird a lot of his music sounded! After that, I went back to the lobby area for the finale disco party. I watched above from the stairs but couldn't really dance with my injury. The male staff dressed like the Village People, which was pretty funny. After that was over, I decided I had enough and I just went into my room for the night and packed my bags. I could have gone to see the same comedian, but just didn't have interest.
None of my devices charged overnight. We had two outlets in the whole room and they were positioned right on top of each other, right above the light switch. So when I plugged my larger portable charger in, it would usually turn the lights on! It just shows how antiquated the ship is getting. Oh and when our bill arrived, we got a $35 mini bar charge. And we didn't use a single item! So now we have to work on getting that reversed.
Immigration went pretty smoothly. We caught a cab for $27 back to the airport. The Miami airport makes Chicago look easy. It's packed, the drop off area gets totally congested because people can park and wait. We made our first flight, though the plane was delayed an hour because we didn't have enough snack packs. No, seriously. Then, we had our three and a half hour flight to Chicago. And everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly. They announced our baggage claim, asked the flight attendants to prepare for landing, and all of that.
All the sudden, they stopped making announcements. A few minutes later, the pilot comes on and explains that the runways are iced in Chicago and they can't clear them. So they were going to put us in a holding pattern and if they couldn't get the runway clear, they would have to reroute us. So after about 30 minutes, we wound up getting rerouted to Minneapolis/St. Paul.
We landed in Minnesota and were told this would only take about 30 minutes it was a fuel and go. So they asked nobody to leave the plane because the terminal was not equipped to handle all the people that were on the airplane. We had about 170 passengers and there were 7 people in each row with two aisles. So this was a pretty large plane. Eventually some people did get off. And I noticed for a while that there wasn't any fuel going on the plane and that the people who had left including my mother, weren't coming back on. It turns out that they would not allow the passengers to reboard from the terminal.
Eventually they had two supervisors come on board and make sure everybody was sitting in the same spot where they had been And we wound up staying in Minneapolis for about 3 hours. There's a small window where we could get it to Chicago so we left. Now I knew the flight from Chicago to Minneapolis takes about an hour. But this flight was taking a little bit longer. However, we did land in Chicago. They announced afterwards that they nearly had to reroute us a second time, but this was going to be to St. Louis. But we had landed so we figured everything was good.
Then we sat on the runway, because there wasn't a gate that could handle our sized aircraft. That turned into two more hours of waiting. Finally we got a gate. Of course, we had to wait another 15 mins for the jet bridge to be driven to us. After getting our luggage and car, we got home about 11 pm, over eight hours later than expected.
We went from 85 degrees and sunny to 30 degrees, cloudy and windy. Nice to be home...I think.
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