Day 1
November 30th: Getting to Acapulco
Bob: But when all the drunks had finally staggered off to bed I caught another hour or so of sleep before our alarm went off and we rolled out of bed. Martin and Monika had a stiff cup of coffee before we left for the airport, which helped them, but I was feeling a bit woozy from lack of sleep and stuck to ice water. Traffic was quite light so early in the morning, so the drive took only about 30 minutes and that gave us plenty of time at the airport to struggle with the "selve-disservice" kiosks at the American Airlines counter to get our boarding passes and luggage tags. Ever since I sweat-soaked my passport in Spain (see Wanderung 17), I have problems at those dratted kiosks because the automatic passport readers can't process the wrinkled, salt-encrusted barcodes on my passport. I am tempted to wash the dratted thing, but that might just make it worse! Having been informed that AA was charging $15 per checked bag for all passengers but would allow two carry-on items per passenger for free, we tried to avoid that $15 baggage fee by cramming all our clothing for the cruise into one wheeled suitcase and then put everything else in 4 assorted carry-ons. The plan was for Monika to carry an oversized "purse" and a bag with our snorkeling gear as her carry-ons, while I would carry my camera bag and a small wheeled overnight bag as my carry-ons. In terms of minimizing baggage fees it was a brilliant plan, even if I do say so myself, but it had one tiny flaw. Almost all our cruise clothes were in our one checked bag, and if anything happened to that one we were toast. Having gone through all this trouble, you may understand that I was somewhat irritated when the dratted kiosk perkily informed us that AA would allow us two free checked bags per customer! Arrrgh. At that point we shifted gears and checked the bag with the snorkeling gear so that Monika had one less thing to keep track during the trip. |
Monika: Martin was such a good sport and got up with us at o'dark hundred (4:00 AM to be exact) and got us to the airport on time. After all, at that time on a Saturday even Chicago's traffic is not too bad.We had our luggage carefully planned: one suitcase with our cruise clothes since AA charges for each checked bag. One bag held our snorkeling gear, and Bob had a large carry-on with some clothes for both of us among which was an extra swimsuit apiece. We remembered Mary Ellen and Leonard from our last cruise who had lost one of their two bags, and were glad that they had clothes for both in each of the suitcases. I had also a new "purse" which was more like a small softsided briefcase, but that way I could take the snorkeling bag for carry-on and the "purse" as my personal item. But it turned out that for international flights 2 checked bags were free, so we also checked our snorkeling gear. I did not put on the Princess tags, so as not to confuse the airlines. I intended to put them on in Acapulco after we went through Customs and were taking the Princess shuttle to the ship, but it didn't work out that way. After having checked in, gotten our boarding passes, and gone through security, we still had time for a quick breakfast, pancakes for Bob and a bagel for me. |
Bob: The flight from Chicago to Dallas was uneventful and arrived on time, so I didn't start to get worried until we were sitting in at the Dallas-Ft. Worth terminal. While waiting for our plane to Acapulco, I chanced to looked out a window and see our big suitcase sitting outside on the taxiway! That, let me tell you, was a disturbing sight, because it was just sort of sitting there by itself and looked for all the world as if it were abandoned. I also didn't see any sign of our bag of snorkeling gear, but I was less worried about that than the suitcase. Finding replacement snorkeling gear was, I reckoned, a lot easier to do in any beach or resort area than finding replacements for the assortment of Gore-tex and Wick-A-Way warm weather clothing that we had carefully accumulated over the years. |
Monika: The flight to Dallas-Ft. Worth went quickly and uneventfully. At DFW we sat down at a window and watched the luggage being unloaded. We were dismayed to see, that three suitcases including a black one with a yellow band around that looked a lot like ours were left sitting on the tarmac. We just kept hoping that someone would look at its tag and get it to Acapulco and when it was gone a little later I thought it must have made it. But there were two flights to Acapulco, a regular AA flight and a flight chartered by Princess - ours - which left half an hour later. So I started to worry about our poor suitcases going on the earlier flight and then waiting for us, hopefully, in Acapulco. Well, there was nothing we could do. So we enjoyed our second flight which boasted a sandwich and even a movie. Wow! The almost three hour flight went rather quickly. We finally reached Acapulco at about 2:15. |
Bob: The flight from Dallas to Acapulco was 2 hours and 45 minutes and, wonder of wonders, we actually had a ham and cheese sandwich and bag of potato chips to munch on the way, probably because the charter was operated by Princess Cruises. The in-flight film was "Mamma Mia", a fairly old movie but one that I had never seen before so I listened in. The little ear plug speakers probably didn't do justice to the musical numbers that were based on ABBA hits, but it was still a pleasant way to spend an hour or two aloft. Besides, it had a happy ending and I'm a sucker for those. The arrival of our charter flight plus the regularly scheduled flights seemed to kind of overwhelm the Immigration and Customs facilities in Acapulco. We waited in a line outside the terminal for half an hour and another hour inside it before finally having our passports stamped by Mexican Immigration. After that I had PLANNED to (1) pick up our luggage, (2) replace the airline tags with the Princess Cruise Line luggage tags, (3) process through another line for Mexican Customs, and (4) than find our shuttle bus to get to the ship. Sounds like a reasonable sequence, doesn't it? Well that plan went into a cocked hat because they directed all the people from our flight straight into a queue for a shuttle bus (step 4) without ever picking up our luggage and without ever processing through customs! Wow, it's a good thing I wasn't an international drug smuggler or something because we were all just kind of ushered through the terminal and right onto the shuttle busses. But as a result I never got a chance to do Steps 1, 2, or 3!! As a result, our checked pieces didn't even have "Princess" stickers on them, so I had to wonder first off, if our luggage had ever arrived in Acapulco, and secondly if they would somehow be paired up with us on the ship? Or would they simply go to that vast lost-luggage room in the sky? |
Monika: It seemed not only our flight, but a couple others had converged on Acapulco and the little airport was overwhelmed. We waited for about half an hour out on the tarmac in the sun ... remember we were coming from Chicago where the high was in the 40's. Here the temperature in the shade was in the 80's and we slowly started to strip. Bob was wearing his suitcoat above his long sleeve shirt to save room in the suitcase. At the end he was stripped down to his undershirt and carrying his coat, suit coat, and long sleeve shirt (he was just going to rip the pant legs off his zip pants when they herded us inside into an air conditioned corridor for more waiting). I could only take off my coat, since I was not wearing much underneath my long sleeve shirt. Finally we got into the building, where we were kept in a corridor where the queue went up a ramp, down a ramp, and then into another waiting section with roped off lines snaking around just like a popular ride at Disney World. But an hour later we finally had made it through immigration, without having obtained a customs form. We were looking for our luggage, when we were informed that it had been directly sent to the ship since we were on the flight that had been chartered by Princess. We checked the remaining suitcases anyway, in case it had been on the earlier regular flight, but could not find it. I was kind of dubious whether our luggage would find us, without the Princess sticker telling the handlers which stateroom to deliver it to. Oh well, again, there was nothing we could do. So we settled back in the bus that would take us to the ship. The bus trip to the ship did indeed take about an hour. We first went through a small town just west of the airport, then drove north along and over a mountain ridge parallel to the coast until we finally saw the high-rises of Acapulco and at the very end of the bay our ship. The road was mainly two lanes with slow traffic, interspersed with a few four lane sections were the traffic actually moved at a reasonable speed. Acapulco itself struck me as a very busy tourist area. It did not look like someplace I would like to come back to and we did drive through almost of the town. But finally we reached the ship. |
Bob: We arrived at the ship about 5 p.m., ravenous and worried. Our hunger was easy to appease by visiting the buffet on the Horizon Court on deck 14. Curiously, the buffet area was in the bow of the Coral Princess rather than aft as in most other ships, but the food was just as good. We explored the ship and walked around the decks for an hour or so after dinner. Walking on deck was particularly pleasant on the Coral Princess because we could easily make a circuit both on the promenade deck at level 7 where the deck was surfaced with wood, and up on deck 15 where the deck was covered with some kind of rubberized cork compound that gave very secure and soft footing. In the end, all the worry about our luggage turned out to be for naught because both pieces of luggage had arrived shortly after 6 p.m. Since they had no stateroom stickers, someone must have looked up our names and staterooms and then carted them off to our cabin--good work, Princess! The timely arrival of our main suitcase gave us time to unpack and stow our belongings before the mandatory lifeboat drill at 7:30, which lasted about half an hour, and after a last turn about the deck to look at the lights around the harbor we turned in for the night. |
Monika: Embarkation was quick and we were happy to settle into our stateroom. It was an outside, obstructed view room, but the lifeboat in front of the window had windows itself so we could see the sea through them ("we see through a glass, darkly"). We rested a bit and I unpacked Bob's carry-on to see what kind of clothes we had and how often I might need to wash. Looked like enough for three days, so two washes over 10 days I could handle. Besides with the toiletries and medicines in my "purse" we were set for the cruise. By now it was 5:30 and we decided to have a bite to eat in the buffet rather than wait for dinner around 8:30; by that time I planned to be asleep, it had been a long day. The buffet was excellent and when we got back, our snorkeling gear had made it. This made me a little more hopeful. Bob laid down to read and rest, and I decided to scope out the library which was at the end of our corridor in the middle of the ship. It had a rather large selection of fiction and I picked out a book that intrigued me, since it was a new book in a series we had read before. When I got back to our stateroom I was pleasantly surprised to see Bob unpacking our suitcase. It had made it after all! So I finished unpacking and settled down with a glass of the smuggled wine that had come inside the suitcase. I had filled three water bottles with wine from the boxed wine we had at Lois's place, then put them in plastic bags and a plastic backpack in case of leaks and stowed them in the middle of the suitcase. At 7:30 was life boat drill and after that we just hit the sack. |
