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This was a sea day where not much of note happened yesterday besides the Kool and the Gang concert. And what a concert it was! This might have been the best concert I’ve ever been to, ever, in my life. Here are a couple of pictures.
The next morning I had a journey off the ship to go to Miami airport.
First, Celebrity gave us instructions to meet in the Rendezvous Lounge at 7:25. This was for self-disembarks. Then the previous night they changed the time to 6:30. Great, I said to myself, we’re arriving extra early.
Well, not exactly. I went to the lounge, but we hadn’t yet docked. In the meantime, I met a couple who were both veterans of a couple of UDCs (like me) and an incredible 10 Soul Train cruises. I also met an alumnus of my old university. He even stayed in one of my old dorms.
We also were graced with the presence of the lead singer for Queen Nation. No pictures of this encounter, but this was the guy at work:
Maybe I’ll see him again next year?
Eventually, at about 7:30, our line started to move. I was among the first 30 passengers off. That’s one of the nice things about how Celebrity treats me – they allow me to be one of the first people off. I choose NOT to think it’s by design.
I did the face recognition thing and got a quick thumbs up. I did a foolish thing by not preregistering for a shuttle. There didn’t seem to be any handy rideshare pickup options (another mistake was not researching this beforehand), so I stood in the taxi line. I got a good driver and we made good time, but the trip cost $45 (with tip). Yikes!!
From where I was dropped off I had to walk a long way to get to a checkpoint that would take unwashed peasants like me. The walk through security wasn’t too bad. I think I was part of a trial – I had to walk with a completely random partner while a little doggie and his handler checked us for… whatever. We were clean and continued on. My drivers’ license scan went well, and that’s where my good luck ran out.
It took a long time to get through the rest of security, partly because the scanner didn’t like my belt and I had to fix that.
After getting through that, I had a very long walk to my gate. I was used to Detroit Metro providing a monorail and/or moving sidewalks for something like this. But MIA had neither of these conveniences.
This closes the book on my Ultimate Disco Cruise. Its future may be in limbo, but I’ll always have the memories.