December 10 - Home

We arrived home early this afternoon after staying in Toronto overnight.  It was a long trip home.

The ship asks that everyone vacate their cabin early in the morning so that they can clean and prepare it for the next set of passengers  who will be arriving around noon today.  So we were off the ship around 9:15am and had to wait until 10:30 for our shuttle bus from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale  to the Miami airport.  Our flight from Miami to Toronto was delayed from 3:30pm until 4:00pm because American Airlines had not scheduled a flight crew for this flight and they had to call up a crew from Dallas to fly the plane.  So that meant we didn't get in to our hotel until 8:30pm.

When we disembarked from the Celebrity Constellation, we noticed a Princess cruise ship docked beside us.  It turns out that this is the ship that Ken & Joan Rockburne had taken for their Caribbean cruise and had we left our ship a little earlier in the morning we might have bumped into each other.

Our flight home took us over the Daytona Speedway.  It is monstrous in size.  It must be quite the site when all 170,000 people are in the stands.

It is a real culture shock when you leave the boat.  For two weeks, you are treated like royalty with service that is beyond your wildest expectations. The you come ashore and it seems that everybody is either angry at something or don't care about their jobs.  And of course onboard almost everything is prepaid and when you came back to reality you have to start grabbing for your wallet.