Embark Marco Polo

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Tuesday 5th January, 2016. Embark Marco Polo

Yesterday we received a message on voicemail to inform us that we would now be embarking the ship at Southampton instead of Avonmouth. We were a little p***ed off about this as the same thing had happened to us last year! At the 11th hour we were told we would not be going from Avonmouth but from Plymouth. So now we have a 3/3 score of not departing or arriving at Avonmouth - our home town!!! Even more irritating was that we had arranged to have lunch with our friends Mike and Liz who are kindly storing our decrepit car on the driveway of their posh Southfork Ranch type house. The change of port meant that we had to check in earlier than originally planned so that we could be taken by bus to Southampton. So this meant NO LUNCH!



Lizzie took us to the Cruise Terminal at Avonmouth straight away. On arrival it was absolute chaos. D grabbed a trolley for the suitcases but it couldn't take all four bags. So M went off into the terminal building to try to find a second trolley. One of the C & M staff recognised M from last year. Feeling sorry that this had happened to us twice he kindly fished out (from a secret stash) two tickets for bus 9. Bus 6 was just leaving and he was handing out tickets for bus 17 to everyone else!! D found our friends Pam and Stewart who had already been waiting for over an hour (they had tickets for bus 10) so we went and sat with them painfully waiting for our buses to be called in the awful terminal building. Once our bus was called we were handed a bag with a sandwich, bottle of water, chocolate bar and a packet of crisps - so much for the Priority Boarding we were supposed to have.



Two and a half hours later we rolled into Southampton Cruise Terminal. Boarding was a relatively painless affair and we found our way to tour cabin. After the mandatory lifeboat drill we met up with Pam and Stewart and arranged to meet them before dinner to see if we could engineer a change of tables so we could dine together (Pam and Stewart travelled around the world with us in 2007 and we have stayed friends ever since). On arrival at the restaurant for dinner the Maitre D' found us a table for 6 where the four of us could sit together.



After dinner we went to the welcome show which was a kind of introduction/hard sell of all the services and entertainers on the ship. We all went to bed shattered. Not a good start to the trip.

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