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Published: March 19th 2023
It’s been over 48 hours since I wrote a blog post but it feels like 4 or 5 days. We are on the ship. I will back-up and tell everything we’ve went through to get here. It’s A LOT.
For starters, let’s back-up to the night we spent in Miami because Kamie has a funny tale to tell… he was outside smoking and the hotel airport shuttle drove-up and the driver proceeded to back into a lady’s car. The driver pulled-up and stayed in the shuttle van… she came outside… he still didn’t get out..… so Kamie told on him! The shuttle driver denied it! There was a shouting matching in Spanish between the shuttle bus driver and the lady (everyone in this area of Miami speaks Spanish as their primary language). She didn’t have too much damage on her car but the hotel van took a hit to the bumper. She finally just left and told Kamie “I hate people that won’t take responsibility for their own actions.” I snuck a picture of the damaged shuttle van today. I suppose the shuttle driver isn’t going to report that to Hilton, huh? I wasn’t sure what was more perplexing –
Kamie telling on the driver or the driver acting like he didn’t do it?! The driver didn’t even acknowledge Kamie today on our way to the airport.
What have we been doing the last couple of days? Well, it’s been a lot of uncomfortable situations but we got through it. Kamie says I have to write the reality of these trips so people don’t think it’s all fun and games. The reality is… we have been extremely sleep deprived and disoriented. We took our COVID tests in Miami and got the results quickly (we were obviously negative). We checked-out of our hotel in Miami before 4pm yesterday, got to the Miami airport, checked luggage, hung outside talking to a girl traveling to Ecuador (she had some interesting stories about her grandma who used to work for the feds in 1949), and finally came back inside to board our plane around 7:00pm. The plane was a 777-300 (I think) and it was packed. They were offering from $600 to $1125 per person (it kept increasing) if you would be willing to switch your flight because they were overbooked. It took forever to board because at least two ladies (that we
Typical housing
Most people in BA live in an apartmentwitnessed) got into verbal arguments with American Airlines over their basinet policy. Apparently, what it says online is not what they honor at the airport. That’s all I understood of the arguments. Kamie quipped at some point.. “at least we won’t have a baby by us because of the seats we got” and about 30 minutes later, as we were walking to our seats, he said “I guess I have to eat my words.” Sitting behind us was a lady and her baby. We paid a little extra for these seats. The seats sucked as they were super uncomfortable and we tossed and turned and could not sleep on that 9+ hour flight but that baby slept all night long and was smiling at everyone when we were walking off the plane this morning. Seriously though… that was a tough flight. The seats were hard, the movie selection was so-so, and we just could not get ourselves in a good place to nap. I wanted to run off that plane. Not only did we not take the route/path we were supposed to take that was on our little backseat monitors at the beginning of the flight… we took some crazy-ass
route that took us over to the west coast of South America, to Santiago Chile, and then straight across to Buenos Aires. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the route change. We really couldn’t understand it. If the captain told us why we changed flight paths, we didn’t understand it because the announcements were mainly in Spanish. The flight was supposed to be 9 hours and we were easily on that plane 11 hours. Eh. We got off the plane and followed the crowd through immigration. The immigration agent did not smile at us. She acted like she had never heard of Costa Cruises. They take your picture and your right thumb print (electronically). After immigration, you get your bags and take them through customs. We stopped to adjust our suitcases so we were one of the last people finally going through customs so it was basically an empty room. Customs in Argentina was like something you see in a movie… one guy leaned back with a toothpick in his mouth slowly waving his arm for you to put your bags on a small conveyer belt… pick-up your stuff and leave. We could have had 100 pounds
of cocaine and 10 snakes and this guy wasn’t awake enough to see it or else he didn’t care. We overpaid for a private taxi/driver (10,300 Arg pesos) in the airport and the next thing we know we are being driven in 5/6/7 lanes of traffic – how many lanes of traffic depended on how many cars could get into a lane at that moment. I’m not sure why Buenos Aires has white lines separating the lanes because no one uses them… typical of some other countries we’ve visited… lots of small cars and motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic and a full-on triangle of congested traffic every time the road got smaller. It was stop n’ go the 20 miles from the airport to the cruise terminal. Surprisingly, we passed through multiple toll stations. The drive didn’t seem too crazy as long as you never looked out the front window as our driver was apparently a magician who could basically touch the back bumper of every car he got behind but not actually hit the car. The ride took almost an hour. The cruise terminal we were dropped off at is setup for all Carnival ships – Holland
America, Princess, and Costa are all owned by Carnival. Today, there was a Holland America ship leaving and a Costa ship leaving. We are on a Costa ship this cruise, a first for us. Costa did not have an English speaking representative in the building. We were supposed to be given priority boarding and some girl with wide eyes (when I spoke English) just took our two large suitcases and handed us a “5” card. We saw others with “1s” and “3s” and a gigantic building full of cruisers. It was around 10:00am. I don’t know because at this point I had lost track of time. Argentina is 2 hours ahead of Miami and 3 hours ahead of Missouri. There was one lady for Costa standing in front of the gate and she would allow people in by numbers (eventually) and when I went to ask a question all she said was “AMERICANS?! ON COSTA?!” and looked at me in full disbelief. She kept trying to send me to Holland America. Believe me lady.. at this point I wanted to get on the Holland America ship too. We sat down and waited… and waited… and waited…after a couple of hours
we saw what was happening… group 5 wasn’t getting on this ship until at least 5pm and we had been emailed prior to this cruise that we had 11am priority boarding. They had just flooded a group of Holland America cruisers on in front of the Costa cruisers as they use the same immigration and scanners. I told Kamie this was our chance… and went back up there… she just took my “5” and let us through. Funny. Costa was still at boarding group “2” and it was after 12pm. We would later see people still getting on the ship at 6pm. The onboarding process was a little more than usual. It involved scanners, another right thumb print, immigration once again, an escalator, a trip down some stairs, and a bus ride about a half mile away to the ship… and then they took our passports once we boarded the ship. This is typical when you are overseas on a ship but I always feel leery of this practice. Once on the ship, our cabin wasn’t ready yet so we got drinks, had a tiny bite of food, and enjoyed the warm weather. It was high 80s but it felt
good. No complaints from me. I sat on the deck listening to Eminem sing The Real Slim Shady in Spanish. We were allowed in our room around 2:30pm and I immediately just took off my travel clothes and my socks and shoes I had been wearing for well over 24 hours and laid down. I tried to sleep off and on for maybe 90 minutes but I was sweating. Come to find out, the heat was on in our cabin full-blast. Someone kept knocking on our door to introduce themselves – Priscilla our English-speaking attendant, Dave our cabin butler, etc. They call him a butler which sounds fancy but he just refills our cabin refrigerator with sodas and beer – whatever we want is free. Costa wins on this end, for sure! Anyway, someone kept knocking on our door because they couldn’t find our luggage – our two big bags with everything I “need” – sandals, a change of clothes, etc. Everyone who knocked to see if we had our luggage yet would say “10 minutes” and then someone else would knock again in 30 minutes and say “10 minutes.” I gave up on sleep or rest. We went downstairs
Plane food. Gross.
Chicken with lots of bell peppers and rice. Cold Roll. Brownie. Salad with olive oil dressing. Crackers. and stood in line at the hospitality desk because my Internet wasn’t working. She gave me instructions. We then had to go get our life jackets, PUT THEM ON, and go to a muster drill. Ships do this thing where you stand out on deck and wear your life jacket and they talk to you about what to do in an emergency. Most cruise lines don’t even do this anymore. Costa does it old-school style. I find this useless. You know what you do in an emergency? You grab that life vest, get to the nearest little boat (the ship has little boats all around it), jump on and move along. I’m not making sure I’m on “the right” boat if the ship is going down. Anyway, I didn’t have my life vest on yet when we got there so I got it on me but didn’t have it buckled and these two old Italian grandmas just started manhandling me and buckled me up and said a bunch of stuff in Italian and smiled at me. I smiled back. The old people on this ship have a kindness about them I appreciate. They are not snobs like some of the
old Americans on most cruise lines. Like, these old ladies are wearing shorts and tank tops and they don’t care about wrinkly arms or cellulite. These are the ladies you want to follow home and eat their homemade pasta, I’m sure. Oh – and why are their Italians all over the ship? Because this ship is full of Italians on vacations and Portuguese or Spanish speaking individuals. We were told at dinner last night that we are the only American couple onboard. The staff loves us. All the staff speak English and they love talking to us. We love them. I’ve never cared about staff on a cruise ship much before but when they are the only ones you can understand, it’s great talking to them! After our muster drill, we headed-off to wait in line once again to find our luggage. At this point we figured it had been eight hours since we dropped-off our luggage and I was worried our luggage left the dock with Holland America. We finally found our luggage on the first floor in a storage room so we took it to our room ourselves. What a mess. By the time we got back to
the room, it was time for dinner. We have a set dining time at 7:30pm every night. We went to dinner. We ordered. There is a large selection of food – everything from shrimp to steak to lasagna bolognese but then there are some items I would never eat – like one of the appetizers was a warm spinach omelet – for dinner? They brought out beef carpaccio and shrimp for appetizers. I didn’t want an appetizer, so I ordered the shrimp for Kamie. As soon as the food was set down and I smelled that shrimp, I was done with dinner. It wasn’t that it wasn’t good looking (it was all very nice)… but I don’t eat shrimp and I get sick when I haven’t slept and at that point I had been awake since around 5:00am Missouri time back on Thursday, March 9
th. It was now around 10pm Friday, March 10
th Missouri time. This gal can’t go 41 hours without sleep. I crashed. I told Kamie I couldn’t eat a bite. I cancelled the dessert and told them we were leaving for our room because I didn’t feel good. They offered to have our butler bring our steaks
to the room. We got to the room and I started getting ready to sleep and the butler showed-up with food. Kamie sat on our balcony and read. He ended-up eating both of our steaks and said they were great. I regretted our decision to take this cruise and wanted to get off the boat in Rio so I could go home. I told Kamie if I still felt bad the next day, we were off this boat in 3 days. I was absolutely done with this vacation. All I knew for sure at that moment was I was going to sleep. Our A/C in the room was on and working. The ship was quiet. I showered and then I slept. I slept some more. I was oblivious to the world. I woke-up around 6am while Kamie was sleeping. I felt amazing, refreshed, and alive again. I sat on our balcony and let the wind and the sunrise wake me up. It felt like a little piece of heaven on that balcony. It’s not cold, not hot. Perfect weather. I’m on the balcony as I write this now and we have a beautiful breeze and I’m in shorts and a
Buenos Aires
Taxes on an apartment you own are around $40 to $100 a year, depends. Most people own and have no rent due to the government change in 2007. It was crazy to hear about. Even though crime is high - it is all knifes or swords to steal items. No one owns a gun. t-shirt. The idea of getting off the boat in Rio is preposterous now and I am not even thinking about it. The sun is out but not shining down on us. It’s perfect.
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Stacy
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Embarkation sounded NUTS! But I do like your nice big bed!