4th Sea Day

We always love enjoying our last day at sea so we were totally packed first thing in the morning and didn’t have to worry about it after that. We had breakfast on the Lido deck today and then wandered around the ship enjoying the sites. We love to play cards so we went down to the card room and spent about 2 ½ hours playing canasta and having coffee and strawberries in these great chocolate cups. It was the first time that I saw the card room was packed with people playing all sorts of card games. We met a girl who had bought one of the horses early in the week for the horse races and had been carrying it around all week so we stopped to talk to her and her father about their horse and although I don’t usually do the horse racing we did stop by for the final day of the horse racing and helped cheer on her horse.

For those of your unfamiliar with the horse races, they have this horse race auction early in the cruise and the winning bidders get the horses. They then carry the horses around all week, some literally everywhere they go. They decorate them and give them names and they try to get other people to buy tickets for their horse to win. Tickets are $2 apiece and depending on how many people bet on the horse depends on how much you could win if the horse you bet on wins. The owners of the horses win $ amounts if their horses win especially in the last final race. The horses are placed on stage by staff and there are lines on the floor. The staff rolls dice and if the dice lands on your horse’s number the horse moves up a line and this continues till one horse wins. You don’t lose much money, a lot less than bingo actually if you play. It’s fun to watch people cheer the horses on.

Next Michael had really liked one of the art pictures by Thomaz Rut and had been looking at it on Thomaz Rut’s website for a year. It was on the ship and in the art auction and since we didn’t want to stay for the whole auction we talked to one of Parkwest’s staff who was handling the auction who agreed to meet with us earlier to answer our questions about the piece and see the appraisal, etc. He agreed to place it early in the auction so we could decide if we seriously wanted to bid so we showed up just as the auction started and he did have it early so we got that and left to go enjoy the rest of our day.

We spent our last afternoon on our deck then put our bags out and went to our last dinner. Sad sad sad!

By now I had also given the thank you cards to our steward, waiters, etc with our extra tips added in them.

Debarkation

We got up the last morning and met our friends for breakfast in the dining room then spent an hour or so taking pictures as we headed back into NY. The ship was running late getting into port due to the swells so they didn’t begin getting passengers off for quite awhile. One neat thing was that the Norwegian spirit was directly behind us heading into NY and for several hours she was either really close behind us or directly beside us and she actually docked first. They let off those that did the self assist first and then started with other passengers. We got off the ship at 11:30 and we were one of the first that didn’t self assist, had a driver and car waiting for us and we were in LaGuardia at 1pm. Now that so many people are doing the self assist, it really ties things up.

We waited in our cabin for quite awhile after they announced the self assists and we headed down when we thought they would be close to calling the first of the other groups which would be ours. People get off on deck 2 in the atrium lobby and the line for self assists was still all the way to the Phantom lounge. Instead of speeding it up by having what they thought would be a few or some passengers debark with self assist now they have so many doing it that they are having to let them out in groups so that NY’s customs people can handle the number and it ties things up for hours. Our driver was great and managed to avoid a lot of traffic delays that caught many of the other cruisers.