Ft. Lauderdale

The cruise we booked is actually two back-to-back cruises sold as a bundle. The ship returned to Ft. Lauderdale.

The ship has to “zero” out all the passengers. There are around 550 people that are staying on for the next cruise. We go to the theater at 9 am and when everyone is there, we go out and go through customs and then get back on. We ended up waiting around for 45 minutes while they found the last four passengers that didn’t come to the theater. Then we went as a group off the ship and through facial recognition, or having a CBP officer look at your passport if facial recognition didn’t work. We couldn’t get back on till everyone had completed this step. Some folks forgot their passport despite multiple reminders and had to be escorted back onto the ship to get it while everyone else stood in line and waited.

The process was supposed to take around 60-90 minutes, but took 150 minutes.

I went to the promenade to look at the resupply process. We had attended a talk yesterday about the ship as a small city. They load 90 pallets of food for each of the 10-day cruises.