Day 29 - Sun - 11/30/2025 - Port Canaveral

 I woke up at 4am to take a bio break and noted that we were already docked in Port Canaveral.  I couldn't see any other ships, but that was about to change.  I went back to sleep and woke up at 7:30am. And there were now two ships beside us: a Norwegian ship and an MSC ship.  We went up to the LIDO for breakfast and ate with the winner of the Voice of The Ocean and his wife.  We got to know them a bit better and the conversation was very interesting and wide ranging.


I then returned to the stateroom and packed up my electronics.  With everything now packed, we went down to the Vista Lounge that was our designated waiting area.  It was pretty crowded but we were able to find a couple of seats.  Because we were self assisted departure passengers, we were told that we could disembark, but our group instructions were to not disembark before 9am.  So we waited until 9am before attempting to scan off the ship.


We were about 20 people from scanning off of the ship when all departures were halted.  We were told that it was a halt instituted by the immigration personnel, but we later learned that it was REALLY due to Princess' inability to get luggage off of the ship and into the baggage claim area.  In fact a cart of luggage was dropped into the ocean and all but two pieces of luggage were retrieved.  Divers had to retrieve the two sunken pieces of luggage.  Once the disembarkation process resumed, we easily scanned off of the ship and made our way to border control and quickly passed through it.  We found our bus (not really as we were directed to take the next available bus instead of the one we were assigned to.  We then waited on board the bus for at least an hour before the bus finally departed and then parked once again for 10 minutes of so.  Finally we were off and were driven to the Kennedy Space Center.  Our tour promoter then had to purchase 320 entry and 320 lunch vouchers which took another 20-30 minutes.  We only had just over 3 hours to visit this very nice attraction.  Our little group of 4 decided that we'd take the venue provided bus tour.


This bus tour gives a great perspective on the space center layout.  We made two stops: One at launch pad 39A and the second was at the Apollo  Control Room.  At 39A, there is a simulated rocked launch, and we also saw a SpaceX rocket being prepared for launch.  (It was launched at 2:44am on Monday morning and I watched the replay of the launch on YouTube,). At the APOLLO site, one gets to see the actual launch control room and a playback of the launch that sent astronauts to the Moon.  






We caught the bus back to the main visitor area and used our vouchers at the Orbit cafe.  The food was actually pretty good and the coupons covered each of our meals except for $0.30 each for Angela and I.  The lady in front of me wouldn't pay the $0.30, so she removed one item from her order.  Strange behavior to say the least.


Back on the bus, were driven to the Hotel Drury in Disney Springs.  There were a couple of traffic accidents in the last section of freeway that really slowed down our arrival which was about 30 minutes late at 4:30pm. Six buses arrived at the same time, but fortunately ours was the first one.  We were sent in a side door and then the chaos began.  The hotel did not have all of the keycard packets prepared before our arrival.  Alan, our tour promoter, grabbed about 30 or 40 of the prepared key card packets and began shouting names.  Many of those people were yet at the hotel, but fortunately ours was in the first group called.  We snaked our way through the chaos and found the elevator and were able to get up to our room on the 8th floor pretty promptly.  Our son and his partner, had been waiting for us and continued to way until we got ourselves situated.  


We caught an elevator down and saw total chaos still in the lobby and a long line for the elevator.  We learned later that some people resorted to checking in directly with the front desk after getting frustrated with the tour promoter's process.  As for us, we met our son and the 4 of us walked to a nearby sports bar and enjoyed a nice dinner while watching football and chatting.  After dinner we returned to the hotel where the chaos was gone.   We said our goodbyes to our son and returned to our room.  I checked on the rocket launch schedule and learned that the launch that was scheduled for 12:15am was moved to 2:44am.  We decided we would not stay up to watch it.  However, I found an APP which pointed me to a nice rerun of the launch on YouTube.

The rocket before it was launched at 2:44am



Tomorrow we have a free day and we initially thought we would purchase EPCOT tickets, but then realized that we'd be pretty pressed for time.  So we decided that we'd would walk to Disney Springs and check it out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day -03 & -02 - Thu/Fri - Home to London

Image
 After a very brief less than 72 hours at home following our last trip out of England, we found ourselves back at SeaTac airport for a direct flight to London on Delta.  Our flight was scheduled for 5:40pm and we arrived at the airport around 3:15pm.  The ticketing agent didn't put our TSA PreCheck on our tickets so we had to return to the ticketing counter to get that fixed.  But I didn't notice another problem until we reached the gate:  we were assigned seats on opposite sides of the airplane.  Fortunately a gate agent was able to fix it and we had seats 47a&b (near the back of the airplane in economy). The A330-200 took off close to on time and we had a little bit longer takeoff roll (yes, I always count the number of seconds for takeoff). Typically it's 31 or 32 seconds; today's was 39 seconds.  The flight was smooth and we were served beverages first (tip: order two as it's a long time until the next one) so we ordered sparkling water and a C...
Read more

Day 01 - Embarkation & Revelations

Image
 Today's blog is a long one.  And what a surprise to start our day!  We started listening to game 7 of the World Series midnight when around 1am there was a sudden noise from the bathroom.  By the time Angela was able to reach the bathroom, the floor was totally covered in water as the bidet hose had exploded under the water pressure as someone else had not turned off the water at the nearby valve. We don't use or even know how to use the bidet.  She was able to turn off the valve and I got up and mopped up the bulk of the water.  I then called the front desk and a workman was sent up immediately who diagnosed the problem and fetched a replacement hose.  The original hose was split at the nozzle and he said that it happens quite frequently.  When he was finished, a housekeeping attendant came with a stack of towels and completed the mopping of the floor.  He also left us 3 extra towels just in case.   With all of that excitement behind u...
Read more

Day -01 - London Walk

Image
 Because we did the city tour yesterday, we had all day Saturday free to do what we desired.  We ended up listening to game 6 of the World Series from midnight until 3am so we weren't in much of a hurry to get up early.  Our only deadline was the 11am cutoff for the hotel buffet breakfast that was included with our tour.  We were able to enjoy breakfast and then headed out to walk to Trafalgar Square which is about 4 miles from the hotel in the Kensington District.  We learned that the Kensington district is one of the most expensive places to own property in greater London.  A small one bedroom 1,000 square foot apartment sells for over the equivalent of $1.5 million dollars or more! Our first stop was a little hardware store across the street from the hotel.  Jack's Hardware has a small storefront, but once inside, the store is deep and has a basement.  I was looking for another latch for our daughter and the clerk quickly found it after I showe...
Read more