Cruise Chronicles: Departure

Cruise Chronicles - My wife and I recently returned from a nine-day Caribbean cruise.  These are our tales.

One of the especially endearing elements of my latent obsessive compulsive behavior is my obsession with arriving to places on time.  I like to be so on time, in fact, that I often get there several hours early.  This makes for awkward dinner parties.

Most chronocentric (nice!) vacation elements punish you for arriving early.  If you get to the airport too early you have to wait at the gate through several other flights while the counter people eye you suspiciously and the security people take a more-than-cursory glance at your properly sized carry-on.  So you sit there and buy a (three dollar?!) bottle of water and wait until you have to pee, which will be the only respite from your monotony.  At hotels if you get there before the official check-in time you'll be in the lobby rooting through the ten thousand brochures featuring quaint local activities like the Senior Glass Blowing demonstration or the $20/person See Our Backyard tour.  Your only hope is to come across the fossilized remains of that morning's continental breakfast. 

But cruises reward you for getting there early.  The boat leaves at 4:30 pm?  Get there at 11.  You'll avoid all the lines, be shuffled aboard quickly by employees who are still smiling and cheerful because they have yet to deal with That Old Cranky Guy or Six-Kid German-Speaking Family.  Once onboard they let you walk around like you own the place.  Bars are open.  There is fresh food at the buffet.  Unlimited soft serve! 

The four hours before our boat actually left were some of the best times on our vacation.  We were local to the cruise terminal, and almost adjacent to my Navy base, so we dropped off our car on Navy property (free parking! YES!) and had one of my coworkers drop us off at the terminal (valet!).  We slipped through the embarkation lines and were on the boat in less than twenty minutes.  The boat was ours.  We staked out our window seats, sipped our Virginia Sunrise (boat drink #1) and toasted as the ship departed.  Our suitcases were among the first delivered to the staterooms, and my early and pleasant conversation with the maitre' d guaranteed us a private dinner table away from That Old Cranky Guy and Six-Kid German-Speaking Family.  Unfortunately, however, I misjudged the time needed to walk from our stateroom to the dining room and we arrived at dinner an fifty-six minutes early that evening.  It was to be the only flaw in our otherwise schedule-perfect departure day.