I'll be leaving on a 7 night cruise on Princess Cruise Lines Caribbean Princess in about 77 hours. Ask me how my packing is going. No, really, go ahead and ask me..... Ummmm... My response is, Packing???!?!?! Yes that's right, I'm sure you'll be shocked to discover the the Queen of the Procrastinators can even put packing for vacation off until the last minute. It's not that I'm not excited about the trip and nearly dying with anticipation, because I am! I just hate packing.
If you think my procrastination to pack for the trip is bad, you wouldn't believe how bad it is to pack for coming home. That gets down right ugly! My travel buddy who goes with me on most of these trips, though not this one, has commented on my foul mood during that last day at sea on a number of occasions. She usually excuses herself around lunchtime on the last day at sea and quietly goes to the cabin to pack while I suck the last few hours of the cruise in taking advantage of every last second near the pool. When she rejoins me, it is now her custom to be very quiet about the subject of packing. She generally doesn't even bring the topic up in conversation anymore. I think if she could, she would try to keep others around us from using the "P" word in my presence.
I've been on a lot of cruises. On every cruise I've ever been on, the last full day you are out, you are at sea all day traveling to the disembarkation port (that's cruise talk for place where they make you get off the ship or pay to go again). During that last day at sea, there are tons of activities to participate in around the pool and all over the ship. There are many contests around the pool, bingo games with free cruises up for grabs (if you're into that sort of thing), activities that involve drinking like cocktail making or wine tasting, giant poker tournaments in the casino, and some great (by cruise ship standards) deals in the shops. They work very hard at keeping you entertained all the time when you are on the ship. But that last day at sea they put it in high gear. I suppose their goal that last day is to make you wish you didn't have to get off the ship or at least make you want to go back home and re-book immediately if not run to the Loyalty Ambassador's office and re-book before leaving.
I, however, like taking that day to spend doing absolutely nothing. It's my last day to act like a princess being waited on hand and foot. I like that on a cruise ship, someone actually comes around and puts the bread on my plate for me. I don't have to reach in the basket for a roll like the peasants on land. Someone brings coffee to my room each morning and I sip it on my balcony. I don't have to go to the kitchen and wash cat dishes, feed the cats re-fill their water bowl and feed the fish before I can get a cup of coffee on a ship. A nice man just brings it to me, I walk to my balcony and voila! Coffee! So on my last day, I soak it all in to reflect back on until I can get on my next cruise ship. The problem that I run into is that eventually, at some point you do have to pack your things up so that you can get off the ship bright and early the next morning.
You see, generally, cruise ships reach their disembarkation port around 5 or 6 AM. They have to get there early so that the customs agents can get on board, do whatever it is they do (let's face it, they're probably sitting around with the captain, the pilot who came on board as the ship was making it's way to port to guide it in, and the dance choreographer from the shows swapping stories about life upon the sea) then release the ship so that everyone can disembark, luggage can be off loaded, crew members who are leaving can get away, new crew members can board, everything can be cleaned and made ready for all new passengers, repairs that can only be made in port can be initiated, a week's worth of food and drinks can be loaded on board, the previous week's trash can be removed, and 3,000 new passengers can be loaded back on beginning at noon and completing by 4 or 5 PM. It's a lot to get done in a short period of time. So, the crew members do not take kindly to dawdlers. After a week of absolute leisure and pampering, they expect you to get your stuff together, go where you are supposed to go and stay out of their way so they can get their jobs done. And really, it's not too much to expect. So, if you wake up on disembarkation day with clothes strewn all over your room and suitcases still stored under your bed,you're probably not going to be out of the room in time for the cabin steward to start doing his job.
So here's what they do. You have two options on disembarkation day and you have to decide ahead of time which you are doing and let them know. If you want to take all of your luggage off the ship yourself with no help from the crew, you can, but that means you have to be ready to go at 8:00 AM. When they announce that the ship has cleared customs and passengers carrying their own luggage to shore can disembark, you have to get in line to leave. As you exit the ship they scan your Seapass card so they can keep track of who they still have on board that way. If you are in this group you will find that there are a lot of people who severely over estimate their own ability to drag multiple pieces of heavy oversized luggage all around a ship, down a gangway and through a port terminal and customs on disembarkation day. Because they didn't think this through on the previous day when they had to get luggage tags if they wanted to have their heavy luggage taken to shore for them, they are now gumming up the works and making the people who took the time to pack their luggage around lunchtime the day before and determined if it was going to be possible for them to drag it around a ship and terminal for a few hours on their own, wait on them. This is what my friend Jenny is really good at. She gets her stuff packed and has a plan the day before we disembark.
I eventually get my luggage packed the day before. But it doesn't happen until I am ready to dress for dinner. Then I'm running around the cabin in a complete state of panic trying to get dressed, and determine how I am going to fit my snorkel gear in my suitcase or if there are any clothes I can just throw away so that I can fit everything in my luggage, all at once. It's not pretty. But still, I'd rather do my packing like this than to do it in the middle of the perfect last day at sea. To me once I start packing, the vacation is officially over and it's back to reality. Packing to leave is one of those "must do's" in life. There aren't a lot of "must do's" on a cruise ship beyond muster. And that's why I hate it so much. Seriously, once I begin to pack to leave the ship, my mood becomes horrible. Nobody wants to be around me for the remainder of the cruise. So, every time somebody says, "Have you packed yet?" and reminds me that I have to leave, I get a little pissy. When I'm pissy, I'm not fun to be around. That's why Jenny, my travel buddy has learned to just sneak away and pack and not mention it to me. It's not an effort on her part to make me happy so much as a self defense mechanism. I get ugly when I think about leaving a ship.
So getting back to the two options you have for disembarkation... If you determine that you will need help getting your luggage off the ship, they assign you luggage tags on that last day at sea. The luggage tags are color coded with the color indicating what time you'll be allowed to leave the ship. When they call your color out, you must get in line and disembark. Then once you get to the ships terminal, you go find your luggage, get a porter who loads it all up for you on a cart and proceed through customs. It's all much more civilized than taking your luggage off yourself. There are a couple of issues you face if you go with this option, however. The first is you usually have to sit around in a public area on the ship for a few hours waiting for your color to be called. You can't stay in your room, because they are preparing it for the new passengers and unless you are highly entertained by people watching there is very little to do. After 7 days with your traveling companions, you really don't want to say another word to them and if they say anything to you, you could become homicidal.
The other issue is that if they are going to remove your luggage, it has to be packed and sitting outside of your cabin door on the night before, usually by 10 PM so that it can be picked up and stored in a holding area. Then the following morning as soon as the ship clears customs, they begin removing the luggage from the holding areas to the port terminal so that you can claim it after you disembark. It's a pretty good system assuming you have the self discipline to pack your luggage the day before and you don't do something hair brained like leave your Seapass card in the pocket of the shorts you wore the day before which have been packed in a bag that was left outside your cabin door the previous night and picked up and removed from the ship before you woke up on disembarkation day. Believe me, I've seen it happen. I spoke to someone on a cruise recently, who had to have her husband disembark, wait until their luggage was available in the terminal, open her luggage up, go through pockets of dirty clothes, find her Seapass card and have a crew member take it back on board the ship to her so that she could disembark. What I'm saying is, you can't just throw stuff in your checked luggage willy-nilly. You have to think these things through. I'm not much of a thinker while I'm on vacation.
So you can see just how stressful ending your vacation can be and why I would prefer that the vacation just not end. I will tell you that since I now have a job that I love, leaving a cruise ship is not as stressful for me as it once was. Even Jenny commented on the last day of our cruise last January that I was not nearly as bitchy to be around at the end of the cruise as in previous years simply because I knew that when I got home, I didn't have to go back to a job that I hated. Strange how an unhappy job can even screw up your vacation. Stranger yet that her comment about my normal bitchiness didn't offend me in anyway. It's always good to know your level of bitchiness at various times and the triggers for said bitchiness.
Well, I've put off packing long enough. I have several clients to take care of before I can go upstairs and get this started. So, I'll end this blog entry by wishing you a happy Hump Day and happy travels.
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