All Good Cruises Must Come to an End

Before disembarking, we got together with our longtime Toronto cruising friends, Bud and Jessie, for lunch in the Grand Dining Room.

Oceania often features a shared platter of foods of various cuisines. “A Taste of Asia” is one of their best ones.

We bid goodbye to them after our final round of Team Trivia later in the afternoon. We finished mainly just below the winners, with scores averaging a respectable 75% in tough competition.

Tom, Ellyn, Greg, and we finally got to dine in the Italian specialty restaurant, Toscana, on our final evening of the cruise. It was as delicious as ever, starting with the appetizers.

The pasta was sublime.

The Trio Toscana is the perfect plate for avoiding difficult decisions. It currently features tagliolini carbonara, risotto all’aragosta, and gnocchi al pesto.

It would be difficult in our experience to match in Italy the quality of Oceania’s USDA Prime Grade beef and Colorado lamb.

Alas, all good cruises must end, and we broke our no-breakfast regime to enjoy generous portions of Eggs Benedict in the Main Dining Room Wednesday morning before saying our goodbyes to Tom, Ellyn, and Greg.

We disembarked at around 10:00 am Wednesday and caught an Uber to our Airport Tru by Hilton, a new property in the Blue Lagoon area sharing a building with a Hilton Home2 Suites. 

Hilton, Marriott, and IHG keep adding so many different brands that we’ve given up trying to keep track of them all.

We were grateful to learn that our room was available mid-morning. After 12 days in a stateroom, it looked huge. It even offered a lagoon view.

We’re not ashamed to say we spent much of the day resting and napping, emerging to discover an excellent little Italian restaurant, Cappriccio, in a small plaza just down the block.

Kathy’s lasagna and Brian’s ravioli were both excellent and reasonably priced. We couldn’t finish them. It did not suffer in comparison to Oceania (or were we just really hungry?).

We didn’t sleep that well after all the napping during the day, but at 7:00 am Thanksgiving morning we were waiting with about seven others outside the lobby to catch the airport shuttle.

It didn’t arrive.

After several contacts with the front desk, we learned the driver was allegedly stuck in airport traffic. This was getting, ah, interesting in terms of our 9:00 am departure to Seattle.

We managed to bail around 7:20 by sharing an Uber with a young woman who’d already called one. 

Departures did indeed look crowded.

We suggested that the driver, skilled but not an English speaker (this is Miami), deliver us to Arrivals, as translated by our fellow passenger. That did the trick.

He found the right spot, and we were soon through a quiet TSA PreCheck line and seated at the gate with 40 minutes to spare before boarding. Whew!

AS 703 MIA-SEA was only about a third full, although all 16 seats in F were taken, with us in Row 4.

It was a pleasant six hours in the air, and Brian managed to learn from our friendly flight attendant that their crew shuttle delivered them to MIA Arrivals, due to an “incident” disrupting the Departure lanes. We suspect MIA has more than its share of incidents, and still think the hotel dropped the ball.

It was nice to catch some views as we approached SEA on a clear afternoon for a 1:00 pm landing.

For whatever reason, we landed at the South Satellite, which we usually only visit for international flights. Three train rides later (the SEA train system is somewhat confusing) we made our way to an uncrowded Alaska Lounge to relax for a couple of hours before catching the final flight of our trip. 

The travel gods had one last surprise for us.

We were seated in the lightly loaded Embraer 175 ready for an on-time departure to Bellingham when the pilot announced his regrets that he’d forgotten to tell us our plane had to be de-iced, according to Operations (we hoped he at least hadn’t forgotten anything important).

The surface temperature was in the mid-30s F (just above 0 C) so who could object to that? We waited and waited. A truck showed up at our gate (the pilot indicated it would be accomplished there rather than a de-icing station), but sat there for some time. Eventually the tug pushed us back from the jet bridge.

Finally the de-icing was completed fairly quickly.

We eventually took off and subsequent landed at BLI about 40 minutes late. We wouldn’t think of asking a neighbor to pick us up Thanksgiving evening and our delayed arrival confirmed that. We had reserved the local Red Taxi prior to leaving on our trip, and the patient driver whisked us home efficiently.

It’s always great to return home, to sleep in our own bed, and to drink our own coffee.

This morning we can even admire our new Meyer Lemon tree, lovingly cared for by our neighbor. Thanks, Carmen!

We have a lot to catch up on, and we’ll start with one more cup of coffee.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all!