Day 42 - Friday, 12/20/24 - At Sea to Florida - Day 8

It's hard to believe that day 42 has finally arrived. It's our last day on the ship and it's sort of bittersweet. Well I would love to stay on the ship for another cruise. I have obligations at home that we need to take care of. Plus we only have to wait about three months and we'll be back in Fort Lauderdale for some more cruising.

We were up by 7 AM to eat breakfast and then attend the interdenominational devotional time. This was followed by Nick's coffee chat, which occurred in the main stage. There he interviewed the crew members who support all of the shows and audio and visual displays all around the ship. They are all from the Philippines and have various length contracts. It was an interesting set of interviews and to a person in his response to the last question that Nick asked every guest, they all replied that their beds were not made. That generated quite a laugh from the audience.

Nick did then the canned presentation City on the Sea, which is an audio/visual program that shows various crew members in their roles and lives on board. We've seen it a number of times but decided to stay and watch Nick present because he's a really good presenter and he tends to personalize the presentation more so than others. At the end of the presentation, he awarded a bottle of bubbly to a lady who was a professional clown and did that for some 30 years. We learned that Nick took notes throughout the cruise to figure out who would be the appropriate person to present the bottle to, and I think he made a good choice.

In his lunch navigational and weather speech, the captain noted that $1800 had been raised through the sale of pictures of the moon bow that had been taken by the crew a few days earlier. He had arranged with the photo studio to make the pictures available and printed form for a small price. The money raised was going to be donated to the crew fund.

After lunch, Richard Watson gave his final presentation and the topic for this day were small and not so small islands in the Atlantic ocean. There were a number of of them I had never heard of and it was a pretty interesting presentation. Bradley Jacobs, and then did his summary AI presentation And show the number of clips of things that we had covered in prior classes. I think this class probably was for me. The signature lecture series for the whole cruise. It was a very relevant topic presented in a very engaging manner, and it had significant consistent large participation by the audience. He even passed out a summer sheet two pages front and back on one sheet with lots of summary material.

Afterwards, we adjourned to the Crow's Nest or our customary Coke Zeros and peanuts and watched the setting sun on a very flat sea. I could see on the Marine Traffic map that there were a number of ships headed for Fort Lauderdale, and we were one. I was able to squeeze in a little bit of preliminary packing which I finished after the evening entertainment.

Speaking of evening entertainment, Hyperion Knight, piano virtuoso, was the evening entertainment. It's again a performance that we've seen before on other ships, but it's fresh for me every time because of the way he presents the history behind the songs. It's very engaging and I love hearing the background information.

We had to have our luggage out by midnight and we easily beat that deadline. We were just left with the clothes on our backs and whatever would fit in our backpacks. We wouldn't see the luggage until the next morning when we retrieved it inside the terminal building. And we were able to be in bed by 10:30 to get a good nights rest. We need to get up at 7 o'clock again on Saturday morning to be able to eat breakfast before this embarking the ship for the final time. We are signed up for a Holland America short excursion, which is a land and sea tour and transferred to the airport. We've done this tour a number of times before and it is a good filler as our departing flight doesn't go out until 6 PM. The only other two choices are to catch a shuttle to the airport and wait in the airport nine hours or there's also another tour where one can observe alligators via an air boat, or a tour of Miami and transferred to the airport. Again, we've done all of these before so it's sort of a pick your poison sort of choice.

To sum everything up, it was a great 42 day cruise. We were able to put her feet on the ground in Africa in three different locations, spend time with old friends, meet and make some new friends, and essentially have a healthy time. Angela's initial injury is pretty much healed and I'm certain she'll get stronger as the days go by.