Day 13, May 16, 2015, Serenity Crossing – Half Day at Sea and Docking in Lisbon – Part 1

At about 5am, the door to the balcony started whistling horribly.  It seemed like there was a huge storm outside.  The ship was rocking a ton.  Bob tried to shut the door, but it was shut.  He went back to bed and it kept up howling.  So, he got up again and opened and then relocked the door.  The whistling stopped!  Bob went back to bed and then again at 5:20am, it opened itself again and the whistling started.  This continued randomly for the next 3 hours.  There clearly is something wrong with the door and we had a very hard time sleeping.

Outside, it was 61 degrees and sunny.  But the waves were quite large.  There was lots of sea spray and clearly not conducive to walking (in fact, the deck was closed).  So, we got up and got ready for the day. 

We went down to the 10am talk by Ken Rees on “One Million Miles – One Thousand Stories.”  He shared a number of stories about his days as a TV reporter.  It was a great talk.  It started with him trying to get some video of the Queen Mum and concluded with his reporting at the Oscars. An excellent talk with lots of laughs.

After that, we decided to skip the talk by Ronald Marks.  The plan was for Cruise Director Rick to moderate a Q/A to discuss various topics.  We returned to the room and started to do our packing as we disembark tomorrow (tonight).  Our plane from Lisbon leaves at 5am, so our plan is to leave the ship at about 2:15am.  It is going to be a crazy night.

We went up to Tastes for lunch and had pizza.  Then we went outside to watch us go under the bridge and dock in Lisbon.  Once we were cleared for disembarkation, we left and headed to find an ATM and also to do some geocaching.  We couldn’t find three, but finally found one of them.  We left a travel bug.  We wandered around the port area and walked by the little dock and restaurant area.  Our first ATM find would not work, but eventually we found a second one out on the main street by the docks.

We re-boarded the ship, chatted with the front desk about our taxi.  The plan is for us to call down to the front desk when we are ready to have someone come and get our luggage.  They will haul it down and the front desk will help us get off the ship.  We hope that it all goes smoothly, but knowing Crystal, it will be great.

For dinner tonight, we are going to Prego.

Pictures to follow in part 2.