Friday at home...we have disembarked

I can't believe it has been almost a week since the end of the cruise and that this is my third day at home. The cat woke me up this morning at 5:00 a.m. by barfing on the bed. This did not happen on the cruise!

Plus, where is that room service when you need it? I think I am addicted to sweet little croissants and things that just do not appear here at home.

We sailed into Venice last Saturday just as the sun was rising.


After this view of the Serenisimma, the disembarkation was such a zoo! You have to put your bags out the night before and then get up (assuming you have slept) and be ready to go by an assigned time. You meet in one of the lounges and when they call your color and number you get off the ship. Then you are supposed to meet your luggage in a large terminal, where they have been grouped by color and number.

We had changed our color/number to "Red 15" with a disembarkation time of 9:00 a.m. At 7:30 a.m. our cabin attendant knocked on the door and asked when we were leaving. When I said sometime before 9:00 he gave me his patented blank stare and said we had to be out by 8:00 a.m. What?? No one else knew anything about this.

So you can see we were well prepared for the chaos in the cruise terminal building where we found all of our luggage except for one of my bags. Lesley and I stood in line to get two carts for all of the suitcases and then realized that one was missing. Lesley did finally find my bag somewhere all alone because all of the tags had been torn off!

The private taxi service that we had worried about was not as straightforward as we had hoped. You had to pay the dispatcher at a stand at the exit for the terminal. He took the money, gave you a receipt and told you which taxi to look for. Our taxi was 129. "Just go to the last floating dock," the dispatcher said pointing back in the direction we had come.

So about half of the passengers (the ship held 2,000) were crammed into the area of the floating docks, and several dozen water taxis (motor boats to you) were floating in the water waiting their turn to pick people up. I went off and found 129 floating in the middle and somehow made eye contact. He was a nice looking man about our age, not the sexy blond in taxi 145. Number 129 quickly starting angling toward one of the three places where you could board the taxis, we began trying to thread our way through the crowd of people and luggage tolleys, and in pretty short order we were on board.

There had apparently been "acqua alta" that day which you could sort of tell from the waves spraying up as they hit the floating docks. The driver said something about it being possible (or did he say impossible?) to get to the dock for our hotel. When it is high water there are some bridges that you cannot pass under, so we were lucky. The trip to the Hotel Violino d'Oro was amazing as is any trip around Venice by boat. And we managed to give the guy two tips, so he was probably a very happy driver.

Later