Alaska Vacation 2009 Sunday 5/17/09 Homeward Bound

Unfortunately this day arrived way to soon. It was time for our cruise to end. We got up around 7AM. We had left a room service request on the outside door handle the night before and our food arrived at our cabin around 8:30AM We were supposed to meet Karan, our concierge, in the Stardust Theater at 9:30 for our priority disembarkation. It took us a little bit to get off the ship. Long lines waiting to go through customs. When we finally did hit the streets, we decided to hang out in Seattle for a bit. Our flight home wasn't scheduled to leave until 10:15PM, so we had all day and most of the evening until we even started on our way home. Our flight would take us to Newark and then onto Norfolk, where we would arrive home at 9:45AM the following morning. We hung out at Pikes Place Market, where it was extremely crowded again. It was fairly early on a Sunday morning and there were loads of people. They were having some type of cheese festival going on. Just long tables and booth after booth of cheese tasting. And the last thing that I wanted to do after eating heavily on a cruise, was to eat lots of cheese and get all bound up. So in a sign of goodwill towards my internal workings, I stayed away from the cheese lines. After an hour or so of walking around, we decided to take a cab to the airport. We ended up just camping out in a quiet area reading a book and catching some sleep. We spent an easy 10 hours at the airport before boarding our flight home. Needless to say it was a long day. It was the end of a really great vacation and now we had to get back to reality. We really loved our old reality, as temporary as it was. The memories of our cruise will linger on ...something that we can revisit as the days drift by and turn into months and then into years. The best thing about the cruise...the absolutely fantastic and beautiful scenery. Time to start over and set our sights on a new adventure. For all of the cruise photos and videos, a lot of which didn't make it on this blog, please feel free to click on my "Webshot" link that is on the upper right hand column of this blog.