This trip was such a long time coming! For May, 2020, my husband K, older daughter J, and I had a cruise scheduled from Boston to Quebec. Then came Covid-19. The cruise, like so much else that year, was canceled. Holland America offered us 125% of what we'd paid, if we let them hold onto the money. The trip was fully paid for. So, it was not like we needed the money back.
I suggested we go for a bigger trip rather than upgrading the current one. We found one that was to go above the Arctic Circle and visit Norway up and back in 2021. We booked it. Then, they sold the ship.
We found a Mediterranean cruise that would stop at a lot of interesting places, like Monaco. We booked it. Eventually, they canceled the cruise. They kept adding more to the offers to let them keep the money we'd already paid.
A new ship was to join the line and make its maiden voyage in July, 2021. It would sail from Venice to Amsterdam. That sounded good and it would definitely be safe and clean. Then, they decided that they wouldn't take possession of the ship until July and the maiden voyage would be in August. We couldn't sail then. K is a college professor, whose classes start in August, and J works for the government and her busiest time of year is the fourth quarter of their fiscal year.
That cruise was canceled on May 6, 2021, and Icelandair sent us a deal that exact day. You can read about that trip in my Iceland blog.
Anyway, we found that the Norway cruise was back and sailing May 15, 2022. Of course, we booked it. We waited to choose shore excursions, because each of the previous times, we'd booked or at least looked at excursions and that seemed to doom the trip. Finally, we went ahead and picked them. Holland America (HAL) postponed the final payment from February until March. We figured they were trying to avoid paying back money.
Then, on April 4, the dreaded email came. They were cancelling our cruise. Of course. Only this time it was because the Netherlands had asked HAL to house 1500 Ukrainian refugees out of the 50,000 the country was planning to accept. You can't be mad at them for this good deed. You can be greatly disappointed. They offered to let us sail in late June, but K has a conference then where he'll be performing and J already had her leave approved for May.
Then, we read the email carefully and got mad- if we did not sail in Europe in 2022, they'd just give us our money back. All the extras we'd earned would disappear. We couldn't even substitute Alaska.
So, J and I got on the phone with each other and searched the HAL site. We found a Mediterranean cruise that was rather similar to the one that had been canceled. Of prime concern, though, was the fact that it was sailing the exact dates as our canceled Norway cruise.
I wrote an email to the AAA supervisor A, with whom we'd been working on finalizing the Norway cruise, because the AAA travel agent we'd been working with was not responding. In the email, I listed everything that I expected on this 6th attempt at a cruise: free WiFi, 4 free dinners around the ship, $50 beverage cards, transportation to a hotel the night before the cruise, a room for the 3 of us in Athens to replace the booking in Amsterdam, transportation to the airport after the cruise ended in Barcelona to replace the trip to the Rotterdam train station. I expected HAL to re-book our flights. They would not need to touch the final flight, because it was still from Paris to Orlando( for K and me) or Washington, DC (for J). I expected HAL to get us flights from Barcelona and since the cruise was cheaper than the Norway one, they could use the difference to pay for those flights. I told her to emphasize that this was our 6th attempt to sail with them. A said she'd use that to try to get us more stuff.
It seemed to have worked. When I went into the itinerary, it showed that we had prepaid gratuities. We were refunded the money that we'd paid for excursions for Norway and then went ahead and chose and paid for excursions for the Mediterranean. They were far cheaper.
At the beginning of May, through a series of phone calls that I prefer not to remember, AAA got the flights scheduled through HAL. I kept asking for a final statement, but was told there were still details to lock down. It turned out that one of them was that pre-cruise hotel. AAA managed to get confirmation of a room for K and me, but not J. In Amsterdam, we had planned to save her some money by having her stay in our room. That was supposed to happen in Athens, too, but AAA found itself trying for days to get that confirmed. The clock was ticking. At one point, to show us how hard the agents were working, AAA forwarded to us the emails they'd sent to HAL, which were going unanswered. AAA even said they'd pay for J's room if HAL could not get the triple for us. I could not print J's boarding docs until this was confirmed and showed up on her boarding pass.
Finally, the evening of May 12, while K and I were at Epcot with our younger daughter and her wife, I got a call from the supervisor A at AAA telling me J had a room. I didn't realize how stressed I'd been about this until I broke down in tears after the conversation. J texted that she could see the pre-cruise hotel on the boarding docs and that she would forward them to me to be printed, since she had no printer. When we got home that night, we printed J's docs and did a little more packing.
J had been saying for a while, and I'd repeated it, that we would not believe that the trip was actually happening until the ship sailed away from Athens. But, here it was the morning of May 13 and were wrapping up our packing. At 8:33 am EDT, we were on the road to the airport courtesy of K's colleague K. We asked what he wanted from Disneyland Paris and he said something from Phantom Manor. We thought that would be easy to find, based on Magic Kingdom in Orlando.
We arrived at Orlando International Airport at 9:15. It turned out that we were dropped right outside of the American Airlines. We found a self-service unit, but it would not read my passport. An agent came over and it took her a while to get it to respond. It finally did and she took care of putting the luggage tags on our bags for us. We double-checked to make sure the bags were being checked through to Athens, before we dropped them at the counter at 9:21.
A Covid test was required for boarding the ship. Since the ship was in Athens, it had to be done one day before sailing. We'd downloaded HAL's Covid app, but without a test, it was useless. The paperwork from the cruise line said that for Greek departures, there would be testing in the terminal for those who couldn't be tested ahead of time. It was now over 2 days until boarding, but we thought we'd see if we could get a test and maybe they'd accept it. We found the testing center and the woman behind the small desk said it would cost $175! We decided to wait until the port. We let J, who lives in Washington, DC, know.
During Covid, our TSA PreCheck had expired. We'd decided to up it to Global Entry to make all of our overseas returns easier. We still get PreCheck with Global entry, so we were through security by 9:37. The tram came quickly and we were at the terminal at 9:42.
We roamed around assessing our food options, finally settling on Zaza Cuban at 9:50. The line was long and far too few people wore masks for our taste. We saw a table open up and I went to claim it while K continued with the line. Shockingly, they had no orange juice. So, we spent $3.85 for a bottled Lemon Ice Tea for me. We also got a Cubano sandwich ($11.50), a chicken bowl ($13.15), guava and guava with creamed cheese pastries (@$3.49,) and a Large Coffee for $2.48. Including tax, the meal came to a whopping $40.43.
While we ate, I had no choice but to watch the people in line, because we were so close to them. It was really amazing how few of them were masked. I know that it is no longer required, but really. Covid is not gone. The staff behind the counter was little better. I think only one of them was masked.
When we finished eating, we strolled down to our gate to wait. It was a little difficult finding two seats that had a little distance from others. We settled in and read until it was time to board.
Finally, at noon, we were seated across from each other in seats 17 C and D on American Airlines flight 1684 to Philadelphia. When I'd finally been able to choose seats on our American Airlines flights, there were not two regular seats next to each other open. I'd been forced to pay for an upgrade to get seats that were as close as these two were. However, when I'd checked out, I found that American had applied a credit for one upgrade. I guess they'd realized there were not two seats together.
At 12:15, the plane was pushed back. At 12:22, they told us there was a hold on our taxiing for 15 minutes due to traffic control for Philly. It wasn't fifteen minutes; it was 22 minutes before we took off. I'd had time to note that few people on the plane were masked, including crew. After that, I slept for a good bit of the flight.
It was 2:45, when we landed and they made us wait on the tarmac in the rain for a few minutes. We were parked at Gate 10 at 3:02 and K and I disembarked at 3:09.
When the plane was pushed back at 4:52, the rain had stopped. Suddenly, we found ourselves parked on the tarmac. The captain came on and said air traffic controller had discovered some weather on our route and they were working to route us around it. I open my phone and went to the Weather Channel app. I pulled up the radar and pulled it out. Yes, there was weather in the Atlantic. How could they have not noticed this before this? It seemed ridiculous and gave me a very bad feeling. However, at 5:41, the engines started up again and at 5:52, we were in the air.
Since we were leaving so much earlier than we usually do for Europe, even K decided to eat dinner. We both chose chicken and it was a good meal. We both had wine with the meal, with K opting for red, while I chose my usual white. It was dry, but I hoped it would help me sleep.
I tried to sleep, but the woman next to me kept elbowing me and hitting me with her blanket. The latter might not sound like much, but it is when you are trying to sleep. I did manage to doze now and again.
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