TransAtlantic Cruise – Today’s the day !!!!

August 17, 2007

The day is finally here ! Tomorrow we’ll awake somewhere over Barcelona. Our day started when Paul’s cell phone woke us up. It was his boss also know as Paul with some problem he wanted Paul to fix, Hey! Doesn’t he know we’re on vacation??

After fixing their problem Paul headed off to the Y to workout and I headed to my chiropractors office to get all straightened out before we leave. We met up back at home and headed off to Chili’s for some lunch, when we got back the box from Amazon that we had feared wouldn’t arrive in time was sitting on our front porch, Paul had ordered a Sci Fi series to read and we were beginning to think we’d have to go to Border’s for books. Also in that box………NASCAR 08 for XBox !!!!

So much for cleaning up the house before we leave, at least we have something interesting to do for the next 3 hours. Turns out there was so much time to kill, the house got clean and we had time to crash a few cars. Paul had arranged for a town car to pick us up at 4:30 for our 8:00 flight, we are using a different service this time after the last service left us stranded at the airport on our return flight. The driver turned up a few minutes early in an SUV, we always had a regular car before, we like them so far. Great driver, no traffic and our trip to the airport was quick and uneventful. Because we were early there was no line either at baggage or check in. In no time at all we were in Friday’s having appetizers and drinks to start our vacation. While we were sitting there trying to chill out Paul said “you know, I’m a little sad we’re not going to see Dylan……and Scott & Shelly.” They are our friends we met on the last DCL cruise and have remained friend 2 years later.

We arrived at the gate before the plane, which should already be here, turns out it was at another gate. While we were sitting in the terminal I was looking in my bag for my book and realized I had forgotten my Passporter ! How could I have forgotten that! With all of the highlighting and bookmarks I’ve stuck in it over the last few months. I’m going to be totally lost on the ship, how am I going to know what I want to do after the planned shore excursions in the ports and HOW can I possibly write trip reports with out that important encyclopedia?

Our flight starts to board at 8:25 and we’re in flight by 9:15 just 1 hr 15 mins after our original takeoff time. Since May I’ve read tons of travel reports and the one thing I was worried about was changing planes either in London or Paris, it just sounded like a hassle to me and I was worried about delays or our luggage not arriving when we did.

We booked our flights with our package through Disney and 30 days ago we got the good news from Vickie, we had a direct flight!! That was the best news so far! Seriously it eliminated my biggest worry. It pays to live in a hub city that is also the home of Delta. So they start to bring around dinner not long after take off, we tell them we ordered two diabetic dinners, the flight attendant tells us, “we didn’t get any diabetic dinners:”. Period. That’s it, not what can you eat, let’s see what we can do. Nothing. Well this is okay for dinner but I’m going to need more than a bagel for breakfast. She tells us she’ll have her captain come by and talk to us. We never saw her.

With dinner over we watched a couple of movies, turns out we didn’t need our laptop for movies, in flight movies on international flights are free. This is our first international flight so we were unaware. I watched Shrek3 and Paul watched Spiderman 3. After the movie I kept my headphones on and listened to music “Spa selections” worked nicely to try and sleep by, along with handy dandy sleep mask they give you in your little package, which I thought had aroma therapy in it. The next day it was scentless, do they pipe that stuff in? I know I didn’t imagine it. If you had asked me I would have said I didn’t sleep any, but I was pretty surprised when they started coming around with breakfast, there was actually light coming in and we were only an hour from landing. For breakfast they managed to get me fruit, cheese, and crackers, along with the granola bar I brought with me I would survive. Pretty soon we were landing in Barcelona!!!!

Lynn