Carnival Splendor Journeys Review: Day 10 – Debarkationfeatured
When we first started cruising, debarkation was this big spectacle.
Mom would wake everyone up at 5:30 in the morning because we had to get up! We had to get ready! We had to get going! The room steward needed to get in the room! Everything was urgent and frenetic (…well, to her it was!). And more times than not, I was already up, usually on the balcony, because my cellular service had been restored and I hadn’t talked to my friends in a WEEK and oh my God how amazing it was to text and have Facebook access again!
These days, we sleep a little later and take it a little slower (and when I woke up sensing the return of my cellular data? I totally went back to sleep). Why rush to get off the ship? I don’t want to get off any ship until the last minute I absolutely have to.
It was still dark out when we woke up around 6:30 in the morning. We were just starting to pull into the Port of Miami. It was still nice and warm outside on the balcony and we wanted to take in as much of it as we could because the temps waiting for us at home were absolutely frigid.
MarQ started announcing self assist debarkation zones as we left our cabin with our carry on bags. Traditionally, we’d have breakfast up on the Lido deck but since our flight wasn’t leaving until the afternoon, we took our time with a breakfast in the dining room. The menu was better, the service was great and the more time we spent on the ship, the further away I was from snow boots and frostbite.
Just as we were leaving the dining room in search of the Platinum debarkation lounge, our zone number was called and since we figured getting off the ship would be quicker and easier with our original number (zone 2), we decided to bite the bullet and just go. And it was a good choice – we didn’t face any lines to get off the ship. We hopped right in an elevator down to deck 3, scanned our cards with one last ding! and walked right off the ship and back towards the cruise terminal we had left behind nine days earlier.
Passing through Customs was different for Mom and Stephanie since their last Caribbean cruise, but was the same one I had when I came back to Tampa from my Cuba cruise in September: there are no more forms to fill out with allowances or declarations. When you get off the ship in Miami, you first go to the luggage carousels (ugh, yes, Miami still uses the carousels and it takes forever to find your luggage since they’re constantly moving). We grabbed a porter because thirteen years and twenty something cruises have not gotten us any better with packing lighter and there was no way we were toting all of that luggage on our own. Thankfully, as we had gotten off with our low zone number, there was a minimal wait to meet with the Customs agent, who looked at our passports and then told us he felt bad for us when he noticed we’d be heading home to Chicago. No questions. I could have had ten thousand dollars worth of undeclared and untaxed souvenirs or six liters of Antiguan rum and all the agent cared about was passing along his condolences for the arctic temperatures we were going home to. I suppose if you come off toting boxes of booze or come off as suspicious, they’d probably ask you some questions, but we passed through quickly and easily.
Our porter hailed us a taxi van large enough to contain our overstuffed luggage and sent us off to the airport.
Oh, and for those of you who have never traveled through an airport the day after Christmas? It’s chaos. It’s not quite hell on earth (or Disney World the week in between Christmas and New Years, which I suppose is the closest manifestation we have), but it’s pretty close. It’s after Christmas so the holiday spirit has passed, it’s packed and everyone is in some kind of mood because they’re coming home from vacation or they’re going off to work or, you know, because there’s an 80-degree swing from where they are and where they’re going home to.
It took us longer to get our luggage checked in (where my suitcase may or may not have been overweight by three pounds, but the generous agent manning the American Priority line graciously turned a blind eye) than it did to pass through security (thanks, TSA PreCheck).
And then we sat. And we waited. We were at our gate by 9:30 AM and our flight wouldn’t even board until 1:20 PM, so we had plenty of time to meander around the airport. Miami International isn’t my favorite airport to waste time in. It’s not the worst – like, it’s not nearly as bad as LaGuardia, but there’s just nothing special there. So we sat, we waited, we had overpriced salads from Wendy’s (because the grab and go options are ridiculously limited for an airport so big). Our plane had come in from Ecuador, and even though it was going back to Chicago, our gate was surrounded by flights leaving for the Caribbean. So we watched people board flights to Antigua and St. Lucia and all of these beautiful places. And then we boarded ours, on time, non-stop to Chicago, where the wind chill was a refreshing 14 degrees below zero.
And that’s where it ended. We landed early. It was so cold we couldn’t feel our fingers. We made a stop at the O’Hare Target and a nearby Panera Bread for some piping hot soup. And then I was in my freezing cold condo in downtown Chicago, marveling at how 12 hours earlier, I had been in 84 degree Florida, how a day ago I had been in the beautiful blue waters of the Caribbean. And now I was here. In the cold.
…and that I had exactly 12 weeks until the next one.
Well, by the time you’ll be reading this, I’ll be on my way to the next one! So on that note, I’m logging off and finishing my packing because we leave for Barcelona in less than 24 hours! Make sure you’re following me on Facebook (Sunglasses and Umbrella Drinks) and Instagram (nicolesonthego) because I’m going to be posting new content daily about the Horizon and the amazing Mediterranean ports of call we’ll be stopping at! And you never know — I might sneak a few new posts up here too while we’re on board! Stay tuned 😉
