Are we excited?

Day before our flight ... People think we must be excited. Actually, I'm in total freak out mode right now. Did not sleep well. Trying to redo my poor packing job and worried about being ready for airport at 6am. I know we'll be fine. I better sleep good tonight. 😋 I'll be excited after we get there. 😱


Did we do the right thing by keeping the RV? We're leaving it stocked with dishes, pots and pans, a set of clothes, bedding, and various other things. If we just sell it after 6 months, someone will have to deal with all the stuff. Gee, maybe I want this notebook ... and this pair of shoes .. and ... I keep throwing miscellaneous things in my already overstuffed suitcase. Not good. Now we're going to need to purge again after we get to the ship and open these suitcases, not to mention all the things we shipped ahead in boxes.

Do we have everything? Too late now if we don't.

Evening before our flight - Alex arranged a party, a going away party for us. You see, I went to high school with Alex and many of my other high school classmates live nearby. We often get together. So this was one last time. I was afraid I would be too frazelled to be much fun, but it turned out great. Telling them about our upcoming adventure allowed us to feel excited again and not just freaked out. It was an early party and we got to bed by 8:30, setting the alarm for 4am.

We drove Alex's car to the airport - just 20 minutes away in Gainesville - and she will pick it up later. Brilliant. I was amazed how busy this small, regional airport was at 5am, but everything was quite efficient. We got off the ground at 6:30 and landed in Miami before 7:30. Our Apple airtags indicated that our luggage made it as well. We had 2 hours layover, then another completely full flight to Cartagena. The airport and luggage claim was a bit chaotic, but in the end we collected all of our luggage including the bag they took from Jim in the plane and checked due to no room in the overheads.

Sunrise over Miami

More chaos getting help with all our bags out to the taxis and finding one big enough to take us. Uber said the trip to the cruise port should be about $12 and we paid $40, but we made it! I am so glad that we now get to travel and not go thru any of that hassle. 

The drive went along the beach for a while and we were amazed at how many people were out swimming, sunning, and playing. Oh yeah! It's Easter Sunday.


The taxi dropped us off at the gates to the cruise port where someone official checked our passports and crossed us off the manifest. Someone would come with a car to take us the rest of the way. That took a while, but we had a peacock to entertain us while we waited!

Yay!! There it is, the cruise ship that is our new home! We walk up the gangway and are met by very friendly and efficient personnel who ask us our cabin number and tell us to leave all our bags - they would be taken to our rooms for us. We were asked to just stay put and someone from guest services would be down to check us in and take us to our room. So nice. No one else there. No crowds, no lines.

We get checked in and we go to our room - or our temporary room anyway. The one we purchased was having some last minute work done so they put us in a room 2 doors down. Oh my, this room must be smaller than ours right? hmmm, no, it's the exact same room - I think it shrunk in the last few months. Jim and I are fine in small spaces, but we're going to have a tough time fitting stuff in here!

I'll think about it tomorrow, right now I need to crash.