Cruise: Acapulco and Home
Just realized I never posted the final entry about the cruise. Need to wrap this up so I can move on.
When we woke up on our final day, we expected to look out the window and see Acapulco. Needless to say we were a bit surprised to look out and see nothing but ocean. Obviously we were running later. A short while later, the captain made an announcement that due to technical difficulties, we would be arriving in Acapulco a couple hours late. We were going to be one of the last people to get off the ship anyway since we were staying in Acapulco for one night so we didn’t have to rush to get ready. Well now we knew we had a lot more time than we expected. Would have slept in a bit later had we known.
After breakfast we returned to the cabin, grabbed our things, and headed off to find a place to sit and wait to be called for immigration and disembarkation. Eventually, between noon and 1, we were finally called to disembark. We had to wait a while for our luggage since the facilities there meant that people were hauling the bags off the ship one cart or dolly at a time, unlike in Fort Lauderdale where they use a forklift.
Once our bags arrived, we hopped on the bus for our hotel, and made our way through Acapulco to the Fairmont Princess Hotel. By now it was almost 2 PM, so we decided to skip any sightseeing in Acapulco and just hang out and enjoy the hotel and its amenities, spending a couple hours at the pool and exploring the grounds.
The next day we waited in the lobby to catch the bus over to the airport for our flight home. That’s when we heard from other passengers from our cruise that the ship had hit bottom while backing out of Huatulco, which explained the listing we experienced. Nobody knew any details, but what we did know was that Regal Princess didn’t leave as scheduled and instead was still in Acapulco.
The airport in Acapulco is a dinky little thing, not at all what we expected. For such a popular vacation destination, I would have thought they’d have a larger airport with more amenities. The only food service was some nondescript burger and fries place, so we skipped that and munched on some snacks we brought with us. At the American Airlines counter, nobody seemed concerned with weighing the bags, but the security people there did open and search all of our bags. Then when we lined up to catch the bus from the terminal to the aircraft (yet another bus), they searched all of the hand luggage even though they all went through an x-ray machine. I thought the TSA was bad.
We flew from Acapulco to Dallas where we ate dinner and checked the news online to find out more details about what was going on with Regal Princess. That’s when we learned the damage was to a ballast tank and that her next cruise had been cancelled so she could be repaired in dry dock. Which meant the 1600+ people who had just boarded, all had to return home. Glad we we weren’t on that cruise! They eventually cancelled a second cruise before she finished repairs in Panama and resumed her normal schedule.
So from Dallas we headed home to St. Louis and back to the real world. We had a wonderful time on our cruise (as we always do). We won a couple times at bingo (and came out $10 in our favor), ate some fantastic food, met some great people like our dinner companions Steve & Joyce and Phyllis & Barb (or Beverly as Joyce kept calling her for some reason) and Sammy Goldstein (who played the piano every night in the Adagio lounge — the place to be on this cruise), and saw a little bit more of the world.