Day 113 – April 27 – At Sea
Today is our final full day at sea. We arrive in Fort Lauderdale early tomorrow morning and will wrap up another wonderful World Cruise.
Today is Koningsdag or Kings day which celebrates the birth of the Netherland’s King Willem Alexander. The holiday is known for Orange Madness so everyone was encouraged to wear something orange.
On Deck for a Cause
One of the morning highlights was the 5K walk to support the fight against cancer “On Deck for a Cause”. Everyone who wanted to participate met in the atrium on Deck Three at 9:30 AM. We headed down to watch the crowd get started and noticed that Henk, the hotel director and Christel, the guest relations manager, were there wearing orange T-shirts with orange wigs. It was quite a sight.
Henk and Christel
On Deck for a Cause participants
Final Texas Hold’em game
Today was my final Texas Hold ‘em game. I played in a total of 119 games and finished in the money in 31 games. I ended up netting out about $150 to the good.
Crew Farewell
The big event today was the Crew Farewell and Grand Finale which took place at 3 PM in the Queen’s Lounge. There is only one Farewell Celebration and we knew it would be packed. We got there quite early to get seats in the front row of the balcony for the best position to take pictures.
As we were waiting for the festivities to start, a slide show was projected on the theater’s screen. They cycled through many pictures that the ship’s photographers took throughout the cruise. It was fun to see ourselves in a picture now and then along with many people that we had come to know over the cruise. Hamish also showed a few videos from the SailAway parties that I edited as well as a six-minute video with 4 to 5 second highlights of all the entertainers that had performed on the Queen’s Lounge stage. I’ll be posting that video later.
The program started with Hamish showing his end of cruise video which was about three minutes long and very well produced. I’m not going to post it online but if you would like to see it send me an email through the website and I can send you a link.
After the video, Barbara, the Location Guide, gave five-minute slide presentation which summed up very nicely the entire cruise and the various ports we visited. After she concluded Captain Mercer recognized her years of service on Holland America as this is Barbara’s final cruise. She is retiring from Holland America.
The finale of the farewell was when most of the crew filed onto the stage to wave and thank the passengers for wonderful cruise. The festivities concluded with Capt. Mercer making some brief remarks.
Packing
We spent the rest of the afternoon packing and moving our suitcases and boxes out to the hallway. I encourage everyone to put the packed bags out as soon as they are packed because there are a lot of suitcases and they want to get an early start moving them down to the ship’s hold.
We received shipping labels from Sarah for the bags we were going to FedEx home. We put them out in the hallway with the rest our bags. Once ashore we retrieved them with your other luggage and cleared customs with all our bags together. Then once out on the sidewalk we dropped off our FedEx bags at a large FedEx truck which was parked right outside the terminal.
Final Dinner
Dinner this evening was a little bittersweet as we said goodbye to our tablemates after a wonderful cruise. We would see some of them the next day but not knowing who we might run into during the busy disembarkation process, we said farewell this evening just to make sure. It was also time to say goodbye to our wonderful dinner wait staff, Deden and Islam, along with assistant dining room manager Presty.
Other items to take care of on the final day were picking up our photos from the photo lab. We bought the all-inclusive photo package and throughout the cruise we would review the pictures and add them to our folder. For an extra fee, we were given all the pictures on a USB drive in addition to the hard copies.
Final Evening Show
The final show of the cruise in the Queen’s Lounge was a split bill with Suzanne Godfrey playing the flute followed by the dancers billed as Tango Cervilla. The tango dancers put on the show they had planned on doing for their first performance, but they had canceled that because the deck was moving too much so we saw the same shows but in a different order. Both Suzanne and Tango Cervilla were very good.
We were up late finishing packing and getting ready for our arrival in Fort Lauderdale. We will spend a few days in Fort Lauderdale before boarding the Crystal Symphony for the Panama Canal cruise back San Diego.