Last Day photos
Today is Sunday, 2/6/2005
There was an abbreviated double-sided, one sheet news letter and a double-sided, one sheet letter with our "Bon Voyage Information" last night. This morning there is only a breakfast buffet in The Grand Dining Room at 7am and we are to have vacated our staterooms by 8am and everyone is to be off the ship by 9am. The buffet is well-stocked, but the waitstaff in the tables is off. We are seated at a table for 6 and only 2 of us have water and coffee, 2 have coffee and we have nothing. There are no salt and pepper shakers on the table. It is organized chaos. Everyone at the table manages to get something to eat and drink and back to vacate our rooms within the hour alloted us.
We are out by 8am and take our carryons out in the atrium and sit with another couple working on the jigsaw puzzle. We have not seen them working on it before but she is upset that it will be left incomplete and wonders if the next cruise will complete it. Debbie says again that it will never be complete by the time we leave and she thinks that it will be replaced with a fresh puzzle for the next group this afternoon. The woman looks stunned and I think maybe Debbie is not such a terrible obsessive/compulsive after all. She has accepted from day one that this puzzle will not be done, ever.
We were in the last group to be disembarked about quarter to 9AM. We walked right off the ship, through customs, and to the taxi line. Negotiated a $10 round trip to drop our baggage at Barrachina and back to the ferry pier. (Barrachina is a restaraunt/jewelry store that the Puerto Rican Tourism Co. and RSSC recommended when asked what we should do with our luggage since there is no where to store it at the piers. They do not charge for this service, but accept tips. The guy that took our bags at Barrachina said the "standard tip" is $5, which was what we had planned to give him anyway. They have a big interior room just off the patio dining area devoted to storing baggage. They gave us a slip with a bag count on it when we checked the bags in and he double checked that we were taking that number out when we checked the bags out.) The taxi driver was not too happy because he was hoping to fill his van and go to the airport, but he took us and even carried Debbie's bag and got Barrachina to open up a few minutes early to accept our bags so he could get back in the taxi line at the ship. (That may have been a lost cause for him because there were probably fewer than 50 people left on the ship when we left it based on the line of luggage remaining in the terminal.) We took the public ferry from Pier 2 in Old San Juan (it is the short one) and bought round trip tickets (which was 4 identical tickets at $.50 each). From Old San Juan you have to specify to Catano, not Hato Rey. From Catano back, the ferries only go to Old San Juan. When you arrive in Catano, walk out the front door under the covered walkway to the sidewalk, it looks like buses and taxis should stop right there but we were assured by the locals that they don't for the Bacardi tours. So, when you reach the street, turn right and walk one block to the green building, you can't miss it, you can see it from the ferry terminal. It appears to be a parking garage with lots of benches out front, we were there early Sunday morning in the rain, and there were only a few men milling about at the car entrance to the garage, they approached us and asked us if we wanted to go to the Bacardi Tour. We said yes and the price for the 2 of us in the van was $3 per person. (We were the only 2 passengers on the ferry going over!) The van picked up one more person on the way to Bacardi, got us there before 10AM and dropped us outside the gate (the guard refused his request to open it to even let us walk on over to the visitor's center.) After about 5-10 minutes, the guard yelled at us to come on through, opened the gate and pointed us in the right direction to walk. We arrived at the visitor's pavilion and gift shop right at 10AM. (Why did we not just take the ship's transfer tour to the airport? We don't like crowds. Our flight was after 5pm and we wanted our leisure for the day.) We got our 2 free drink tickets and waited with a mojito. They filled the first tram over with people from RSSC Diamond. We waited for things to quiet down and then rode over. You get a radio handset and watch a video and look at a reproduction of the Cuban site and listen to snippets about them, then more individual a/v stations, then the little barrels of smelling stations, then the bar demonstration (in a reproduction of a 1930's art deco bar from Cuba), then a big noisy room with videos and music with drawers to pull out but all the contents were on loan at the time so no idea what was supposed to be there. This is where you can send the free video emails (go behind the wall of Bacardi bottles and you will see the hallway with about4 terminals there), then the bathrooms and handset return, out the door to the trams. You will be driven by the factory and different parts of production may be pointed out then back to the bat wing pavilion and gift shop. It is mostly self-guided and self-paced, except that if you have come on a guided tour from a ship the Bacardi guides will keep you together by herding you from one room to another by closing and opening doors to keep you together and on the same tram, so if you go alone, you want to keep that in mind and not join a tram with a tour group on it if possible. We waited for the second tram which was still RSSC passengers, because large buses were just then arriving from other ships. Our observation was that the ship's tour groups did not have time to enjoy their free drinks and were rushed in the gift shop to exit and did not have time to enjoy or even have their 2nd free drinks after the tour was over. There was no hard sell to buy and as this was our last day, we had plenty of time to price liquor in PR and through the islands, it was most expensive at the Bacardi gift shop (we saw the same bottle for $7.95 in St. Thomas at Havensight and $9.95 at Bacardi). It was not a "distillery tour" as it is advertised by Bacardi. We thought it was a good way to spend a few hours early on a rainy Sunday morning. When we were ready to go, we walked over to the visitor's parking lot where there were several taxis waiting and we asked to be taken back to the ferry terminal (again we got an unhappy cabbie as he pressed to take us to our hotel instead) for $3 per person he drove us back and dropped us off at the green building one block from the ferry terminal.
When we came back on the ferry near Noon, it was very crowded with a big press of people lined up at the gate to board. There were still enough seats for everyone. In Old San Juan, we walked up Tanca St. uphill to Sol and ate lunch at El Jibarito, again. We really liked it the first and time and figured, why mess with success. The lunches there were $2-3 more on Sunday than they were on Weds., probably because there were several ships coming in that day, vs. Weds. There were a lot of local business people in there on Weds. and a lot of tourists on Sunday, anyway the food was the same and good and still not expensive, just a heads up that the price did increase. Then we walked over to Barrachina and picked up our luggage and a taxi to the airport, got there the recommended 3hours early and went through security in about 15 minutes. (There were looong lines at American even for the self-check-in kiosks, we had traveled with one carry on bag each for our short cruise and printed our boarding passes from the ship's internet facility.) We found the gate with the first flight to our connecting city and asked if since we were here early we could take it rather than wait (we were traveling on frequent flyer award tickets) they boarded us on the earlier flight in group 4 and we were on our way home by 4pm. After a long 5 hour flight to Dallas, we saw the end of the Super Bowl and boarded a final flight to RDU and got back on time just after 1AM. Took a short cab ride to the office parking and drove our car home, showered and in bed by 2. Back to work in a few hours. I asked Debbie if she was happy to be in our own bed and she said, yeah if this boat would just quit rocking. That is so weird, I feel like the floor is still making that strange Diamond motion too. It passed for me by Tuesday morning, but Debbie says she still feels it. She is still taking Bonine and wearing her bands intermittently throughout each day.
The End.
