Carnival Horizon Review: Day 18 – Debarkationfeatured

I don’t hate many things. Hate is generally a wasteful emotion.

I hate debarkation.

I hate the rush. I hate the downtrodden energy. I hate that we have to leave. I always hate that we have to leave because if you gave me a choice between being at home or being on a cruise ship, the cruise ship will always win. I could be sailing through a tropical storm and I’d still choose the ship. Been there, done that, would still choose it again.

We were up at 6:00 AM. That’s an ungodly hour to be forced awake so you can get off the ship and fly home for 10 hours. Nothing good comes from waking up at 6:00 AM unless you’re catching a tour. Or a flight away from home.

I’d laid my clothes out the night before, so it took minutes before I was up, dressed, scrubbed and we were out of the room. Our home for the past 13 days wasn’t our home anymore and it was time to leave it for someone else to enjoy.

We had a final breakfast up on the Lido deck, where I had one last plate of arepas and bid farewell to my friends at the Blue Iguana Cantina as they began calling self-assist debarkation.

First was self assist decks 10 and above. Then self assist deck 5 and Zone 1 tags. Two days prior, we’d received a letter asking us to indicate if we wanted to get off early or late so they could assign us the proper priority tags. We chose early even though our flight wasn’t until 12:50 PM because we’d heard a strike was planned in Barcelona and we wanted to be prepared, so we were assigned Zone 2, and we were called off the ship just before 7:15 AM.

When you disembark in Barcelona, you don’t go through border control or Customs – you’ll do that at the airport. You literally walk off the ship, grab your luggage and go. And I want to give kudos to the Horizon team for a seamless debarkation. We literally went from our table on the Lido deck to the cab line with all of our luggage in hand in less than 12 minutes. Cruise Director Mike stood at the door giving out free hugs and wishing everyone safe travels. I’d wondered why he was selected of all of Carnival’s entertainment staff to lead this brand new ship, but after sailing with him for nearly two weeks, I understood why: Mike’s a good person. He’s a good CD, too. He’s energetic, he’s always smiling and he’s great at diffusing tense situations in really organic ways, but above and beyond all of that, he’s just really nice and he represents the values of the corporation that everyone on the Q&Awesome panel mentioned were so important when it comes to things like promotion and new opportunities.

The taxi line wasn’t terribly long and we only waited maybe five or ten minutes for a taxi that could fit all of our luggage. The ride to the airport was less than 20 minutes and was a flat rate of €39.

Despite earlier warnings of potential heavy delays at the airport (due to a workers strike protesting for Catalunyan independence), check in at the airport was quick and easy and we breezed through security. Once we were past security, though, the impact of the strike was more evident: most of the cafes were closed. That was okay, though: McDonald’s was open if we needed food and most of the duty free shops were open for us to do any and all last-minute shopping before we boarded our flight.

Here’s where it started to get a little dicey: boarding was a bit of a mess. Well, not a bit. Boarding was a total mess. The gate agents didn’t speak great English, and on this flight to Philadelphia, most of the passengers didn’t speak Catalan (in fact, most of the passengers were our fellow cruisers. Kind of cool, huh?!). Because of this, boarding took forever as agents tried to get passengers with bigger bags to gate check (Stephanie’s backpack, for instance, which fit on the flight over, was somehow now too big to put in the overhead bin). And boarding didn’t occur in the usual Groups 1-2-3-etc order, so everyone was crowding, confused and getting pretty grumpy.

But fine. We get on the plane. We clear for take off, everything is fine. We’re on an older plane which meant a 2-4-2 seat configuration (which always feels slightly more spacious), but an older plane means no seat-back televisions, no wi-fi, no power outlets and more recline…which meant the folks in front of us were basically in our laps. Which is fine. That’s their right. I’m not a recliner, but I’m not going to begrudge someone else by insisting they move for my own comfort. But the recline was egregious enough that the flight attendant asked them (without our prompting) to return their seats upwards during meal service because we wouldn’t have been able to get our tray tables down. Maybe their seats were broken or something because I’m like 82% certain seats shouldn’t recline that much. Anyways, lunch is remarkable for no other reason than the sheer amount of food American Airlines can cram on a tray and call it a lunch. We ate it all. In courses. With wine. It was a long flight and we had nothing else to do.

Our flight from Barcelona to Philadelphia should have taken around eight and a half hours, which would have left us with about an hour and a half to clear customs, check our bags, re-clear security and find our gate. There’s something airlines call a minimum connection time, which is the least amount of time it could take a passenger to connect during flights, so someone somewhere decided that it should never take more than an hour and a half to transfer from an International to a Domestic flight at one of the major east coast hubs. This always sounded a little sketch to me, which is why we applied for Global Entry before we left. Mom and Stephanie were granted Global Entry. I was rejected because apparently visiting Cuba is frowned upon by US Customs & Border Control (even though I was on a cruise ship…and had a visa…and fulfilled all of the requirements of that visa. But that’s another rant for another day).

So we have an hour and a half and a partial fast pass through Customs for two of the three of us. But somehow, we lost time going back and landed a little late. That’s fine. We can move quick. And then we sat on the tarmac for over an hour.

There was rain.

They didn’t have a gate for us.

There was another plane at the gate.

We sat. And we waited.

We ran off the plane as soon as we could. So did hundreds of others from the six other International flights that arrived at the same time as ours.

Luggage was delayed. The line to clear Customs went all the way back to the entrance of the luggage carousels. It was quite literally a human bottleneck: there was a Customs agent on the left, a customs agent on the right, and a sea of hundreds of people trying to make their way to one.

We clear Customs, drop our luggage for re-check and re-clear security (rather expediently, for that matter, thanks to a non-existent line for TSA Pre-Check). We’re about two hours late for our connecting flight home to Chicago…

…a flight that was delayed by more than two and a half hours due to the storms that hit as we were landing.

Crazy stroke of luck. We were exhausted, we were drained, we were STARVING. We power-walked our way through a very large, unfamiliar terminal (none of us had ever flown through Philadelphia before). I grabbed a cheesesteak at Gino’s on the way to the gate, where we boarded almost immediately thereafter.

I ate my cheesesteak as soon as we leveled off (solid A+ — couldn’t be in Philly without getting a steak sammie!) and promptly passed out. I woke up as we were descending through the clouds and gliding past the Chicago skyline.

It was a crazy end to a whirlwind of a trip, but you know me. I don’t rest and I don’t wait. Did I mention I went back to Europe on a second mini Eurotrip (to Belgium, Vienna and Slovakia) a week and a half later?

But that’s another post for another day 🙂 Until then, Stephanie and I are off to Paris for the holidays. Thanks for sticking it out with me through another crazy, long-winded cruise journal. I’ve loved every moment of re-living this and sharing it with all of you, and I really hope you all enjoyed coming along on our little Horizon adventure!