Cruising

Naoyuki and I just completed our 12-day Thanksgiving cruise aboard the Crystal Symphony. Our itinerary included:

San Jose, Costa Rica
Caldera, Costa Rica (a small port on the Pacific Coast)
Transiting the Panama Canal from the Pacific to the Atlantic
Bonaire and Curacao (two of the three Dutch islands off the north coast of Venezuela)
Grand Cayman
Cozumel
Progreso
Tampa

Naturally, we had a blast, although we almost didn’t make it. The original plan was for us to fly from Buffalo to Atlanta early Friday morning, November 24th (the day after Thanksgiving), and then catch a late morning flight from Atlanta to San Jose. That would have put us in San Jose around 1 p.m., plenty of time for the 2-hour bus ride from San Jose to the port at Caldera, from which the Symphony was scheduled to depart around 6 p.m.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving Day. We had Dawn (Naoyuki’s lab tech) and her partner Phoenix over for lunch, then put up the deer fence, and piddled around. About 8 p.m. we decided that we’d go see a movie (For Your Consideration) rather than trying to go to bed early – and found, much to our surprise, that a very dense fog had rolled in, so much so that we couldn’t go down the road at much more than 30 mph.

“Uh oh!” we thought. “What if it’s still like this tomorrow morning?”

We were up by 3:30 a.m. and the fog was, if anything, thicker than it had been when we went to bed. Naoyuki checked our flight online, then called Delta directly, confirming that our 7:30 flight had been cancelled and that they had automatically rebooked us for the next flight – which didn’t get to Atlanta until almost exactly the same time our flight to San Jose was leaving. The next flight out of Atlanta to San Jose would not arrive in Costa Rica until about 10 p.m. – well after the Symphony would have sailed.

We had booked the travel arrangements through Crystal Cruises so Naoyuki called their 24-hour emergency travel hotline. In the meantime I got online and found out that – not unsurprisingly – weather conditions at Rochester International Airport, 60 miles east of us, were crystal clear. (It would appear that we get lake effect FOG as well as lake effect SNOW!)

Naoyuki’s experience with the 24-hour hotline was totally unsatisfactory. He was on hold for 30 minutes before he got a call screener and it was another 15 minutes before he was connected to someone who was actually supposed to help. That person, however, made it clear that there was nothing she could do and that she really had no interest in doing anything anyway. Her best suggestion was to call Crystal if we actually made it to San Jose. When Naoyuki asked if we could expect another 30-minutes on hold if we called back, she pointed out that it was very early in California and that she had been asleep (and why were we bothering her?)

So much “peace of mind!” We found an 8:30 a.m. flight from Rochester to Charlotte that would allow us to catch an 11 a.m. flight from Charlotte to San Jose – plenty of time to make it to the ship! Naoyuki bought two one-way tickets from Rochester to San Jose (via Charlotte) two hours before the flight was supposed to leave. The agent in Rochester who checked us in said, “Well, gee, you got up this morning and decided to go to San Jose, did you?” We pointed out that we’d decided to go to San Jose about 10 months previously but it was only that morning we figured out that we needed to go by way of Rochester.

After that, everything was smooth as silk!