Greetings from Land

Lots to update since it's been 18 days -

Remainder of cruise was good.  J. and I enjoyed a nice 'beach day' excursion after I'd had those couple more days of rest referred to in the last post.  Shortly after that, my body broke out in a hive-like rash - pretty much head to toe but the itchiest parts were my back.  Could have been sun-exposure related - Mom always got sun poisoning so perhaps I'm in that realm now?  Could have been a reaction to Tamiflu, though 'limit sun exposure' was certainly not mentioned.

Who knows - but it resulted in me being super concerned about going out in the sun much - so we agreed to have me cancel my excursions.  You had to cancel 48 hours in advance or pay full price and I honestly couldn't bring myself to let all those expenses 'ride' and feel horribly badly about it if I ended up not feeling up to going.

J. was super worried this would be the vacation from hell in my memory - but it wasn't.  Lovely days of reading a lot, sitting on the balcony watching the port action and/or the expansive ocean.  I enjoyed silly movies I would have otherwise never watched and chilled in our cabin our on Deck 8 most of the time.  J. took all the planned excursions and did a fantastic job posting in detail about each one.

We made it home - first off the ship, actually - offered that option for some strange reason - we think it might have been because of an issue we had with the colored tags for disembarkation.  Told we could get the 'yellows' to be first off only when J. got up early to trek down for the tags at 6AM, he was told 'no, you can't have those - you aren't platinum plus level'.  He made an issue of what he was told vs. reality so they gave him the precious yellow tags.  But then called the day before and offered an option of taking our own bags down to 'Q' (restaurant) at 6:30AM on Sunday morning and we'd get off the ship.

We did that - and quickly realized that the other folks doing the same had all been quarantined within the past recent days for stomach flu - turns out Immigration requires passengers who have been quarantined to disembark separately from all other cruise ship guests.  So we had thus been exposed to the stomach flu.  Great.

We managed our bags ourselves - no small feat given the distance and rambling route we took off the ship.  Immigration folks greeted us warmly and we quickly made it through.  Then trekked all the way back to where we would have been had we been able to disembark from a different part of the ship - got a cab.  Told the driver "Long Beach Airport".  Ever-connected J. realized about 20 minutes into the ride that we weren't headed to Long Beach - he asked the driver 'Sir, where are you taking us?'.  "LAX".  Um, no.  So $150 cab ride later (no, we didn't pay that and the driver made it very clear we should 'ignore the meter'.  Yep, we sure are) we were at Long Beach.  Could have made a much earlier flight but the wrong airport issue resulted in us being able to make the flight with no guarantee our bags would do the same.  So we opted to just stick with our original flight which was shortly after noon.

I lived in So. Cal a long time - and I had never, ever flown out of Long Beach.  LAX, Orange, Ontario?  All yes. But Long Beach?  Never even really knew it existed - but it is a lovely airport.  We found a cafe, plugged in our devices, connected to free WiFi and spent the morning catching up on stuff we'd missed.  My phone hadn't worked or been connected to WiFi in 14+ days so it had a lot of emails to ping about for 3 hours.

We arrived in Tracy (including picking up Chloe) just after 3PM.  Always lovely to be home.  H. did a great job - house was reasonably tidy and we feel confident there were no shenanigans.  No neighbors have complained.  That's a good sign.