Sail-in into Brooklyn was absolutely beautiful, despite the hour. I woke up around 5:30 to the lights of Long Island out the window, and my wife joined me on our balcony as we went under the Verazzano Narrows Bridge and the New York City skyline came into view. I was able to get a few more photos, and get online via the EVDO modem (including clearing out the long queue of articles written at sea)
To disembark the ship, passengers were divided into several color-coded groups. We were in “Light Blue 3″ (”Light Blue” = folks on Northeast Motor Coach busses; “3″ = Folks on the Hartford/Springfield routes). So at 9:20am, we gathered at the Wheelhouse Bar and waited for permission to disembark.
Apparently until fairly recently, staff would use the ship-wide announcement system to let folks know which groups were being permitted off the ship. However, to reduce the stress of the experience, Princess now just tells folks where and when to meet up, and at the relevant lounges, staff armed with walkie-talkies and in-lounge mikes make the announcement. Unfortunately, this left several folks asking passers-by which group they were with, to gauge the queue, and a few folks who had gone outside to smoke or elsewhere to sit ended up not hearing the notifications.
Getting off the ship was orderly, and once inside the cruise terminal, getting moving was a simple matter of finding our bags (placed out and grouped by our color-tags), and getting them over to the customs & immigration folks. Unfortunately, we learned:
- The luggage trolleys are only to be used by the porters, due to union rules; and
- The terminal was short-staffed in the way of porters, allegedly due to some ongoing negotiations between the terminal and the union.
So, my wife and I entertained several folks by getting our luggage over to the customs queue. (I’m told that my carrying two bags and wheeling 3 suitcases, following behind my wife who had loaded up her walker, looked rather comical.)
Clearing customs was a breeze. 16 desks, almost all of them open; the officer (less surly than the trio we met at St. Thomas) glanced at our passports, glanced at our customs form, and waved us on.
A bus ride later, we got home.
It seems strange being someplace where the floor isn’t moving, having so much more space to ourselves (including separate bathrooms!), and not needing to go up or down mutliple flights of stairs to get something other than water to drink. We’re happy to be home, but we wish we still had that balcony overlooking the ocean.
I’m pooped from unloading the car, starting to clean out my work email inbox, etc. It’ll probably be this weekend before I get the cruise photos up in the photo gallery.