starbrat

As @Matthas stated many times, this is not the forum to discuss the efficacy of masking and vaccines. Please keep the discussion on topic. 🙂

Do you test yourself before you fly or before you go the Disney World or before you walk into a concert or your stay t your hotel. No! Wouldn't you want to know if you were contagious? The reality is No no one tests these days for it. Only cruising is being harassed and its absurd! We should not have to test to get on a boat!  if you don't have to test to get in a tiny airplane and sit like sardines for a few hours with recirculated air. We should not have to test to go on a cruise. 

Girl I am over here in my office throwing things at anyone who comes in or sneezes near me. All I have left to throw are a stapler, a dead succulent, and an open can of green monster. I just need to pass our test on Saturday. I am legit loosing it. lol!

Do you test yourself before you fly or before you go the Disney World or before you walk into a concert or your stay t your hotel. No! Wouldn't you want to know if you were contagious? The reality is No no one tests these days for it. Only cruising is being harassed and its absurd! We should not have to test to get on a boat!  if you don't have to test to get in a tiny airplane and sit like sardines for a few hours with recirculated air. We should not have to test to go on a cruise. 

Do you test yourself before you fly or before you go the Disney World or before you walk into a concert or your stay t your hotel. No! Wouldn't you want to know if you were contagious? The reality is No no one tests these days for it. Only cruising is being harassed and its absurd! We should not have to test to get on a boat!  if you don't have to test to get in a tiny airplane and sit like sardines for a few hours with recirculated air. We should not have to test to go on a cruise. 

Do you test yourself before you fly or before you go the Disney World or before you walk into a concert or your stay t your hotel. No! Wouldn't you want to know if you were contagious? The reality is No no one tests these days for it. Only cruising is being harassed and its absurd! We should not have to test to get on a boat!  if you don't have to test to get in a tiny airplane and sit like sardines for a few hours with recirculated air. We should not have to test to go on a cruise. 

This is the bit I don't understand.
Regardless of the cruise line policy, wouldn't you cancel if you were contagious? And wouldn't you want to know if you were contagious?

It is soo stressful. In April I went on my first star class cruise and I paid for our entire party of 10 people. We all had to test negative on that Friday. I was leading a national training and to this day I remember when I got one of the text messages of results. Of course they didn't say negative or positive in the text 🙄 they just sent me a picture of the test. I remember stopping the training to check my phone for an "emergency".  That was the absolute most stressful day of my life! Granted this is a shorter 4 day cruise with just my husband and daughter but its still dang stressful!!  I'm eating multivitamins like they are tic tacs!  

Girl I am over here in my office throwing things at anyone who comes in or sneezes near me. All I have left to throw are a stapler, a dead succulent, and an open can of green monster. I just need to pass our test on Saturday. I am legit loosing it. lol!

Girl I am over here in my office throwing things at anyone who comes in or sneezes near me. All I have left to throw are a stapler, a dead succulent, and an open can of green monster. I just need to pass our test on Saturday. I am legit loosing it. lol!

Girl I am over here in my office throwing things at anyone who comes in or sneezes near me. All I have left to throw are a stapler, a dead succulent, and an open can of green monster. I just need to pass our test on Saturday. I am legit loosing it. lol!

Girl I am over here in my office throwing things at anyone who comes in or sneezes near me. All I have left to throw are a stapler, a dead succulent, and an open can of green monster. I just need to pass our test on Saturday. I am legit loosing it. lol!

Please let Royal be next! lol
At least for short sailings....

At least 2

these ports sure are not shutting the door on planes full of unvaccinated people flying to visit them. I think they will be fine. As long as the cruise ships just drop things slowly (1 mandate here then then next week another mandate dropped there. Just do it little by little.) won’t be a cause for panic. 

these ports sure are not shutting the door on planes full of unvaccinated people flying to visit them. I think they will be fine. As long as the cruise ships just drop things slowly (1 mandate here then then next week another mandate dropped there. Just do it little by little.) won’t be a cause for panic. 

I am envisioning a scene from an old Western movie where the cruise lines are standing around the O.K. Corral waiting to see who fires first.
They are nervously watching each other, waiting for a flinch.  
Once one cruise lines drops testing or vaccine requirements the others will quickly follow.  Who will flinch first?
 

 

Would not recommend the norovirus craps. 😄

They also scrapped the cruise ship color coding system

Wow. That was unexpected.

If I'm king of the cruise world I would immediately:
 
1) eliminate pre-cruise testing. But give some perks or enticements to those who show up with a negative test in hand. 
2) eliminate special quarantine cabins. No reason for them, even if you still want people to quarantine in their booked cabin if they test positive on board. Those things need to be sold, not set aside just in case.
3) taper down to a date where you get rid of the need to quarantine at all. I'm not sure you could do that immediately
4) scrap the 90% rule. Again like #1, give enticement and perks to those who are vaccinated, but let the unvaccinated back on board.
 

Perhaps they caught you trying to smuggle a genie home in his luggage?

Well we are now at T3 in LHR waiting for a gate to be posted. They will not post the gate until an hour before departure. 
 
How can I describe the chaos that is T3 at LHR? The train ride from T5 (where Sofitel is) to T3 was quick and easy. Things started to go wonky when we went to check our bags. Because we are Canadian citizens, but flying into DTW, there was a slight delay as the ticket agent explained that their system doesn’t allow them to check off that we are just passing through the US, and their is no address that we are staying at. I already anticipated this would be a hold up because yesterday when I was doing the online check in, it wouldn’t let us check Hubby in online. And when I was filling in the contact tracing, it would not let me check that I am passing through and not remaining in the US. Anyway, after explaining to the ticket agent that our car is parked at DTW and we drive back to Canada from there, they said all is good and boarding passes were printed. I told them that as long as there is no trouble at the gate, we are all good. 
 
Next came the part where everything you see on the news lately (about LHR) is true. Massive lines to get from checking your luggage to security. The line was wrapped around to the outside, 5 lines deep. Hubby took a pic but the pic doesn’t truly show the craziness here. 


Once you make it into the part of the line that is inside the terminal, it’s about another 75-90 mins to actually get to the security check point. As the ever optimist (glass is half full person), Hubby said at least there are lots of staff directing the crowds, which there was. 
 
Our flight is scheduled to depart at 12:55pm. Last night before bed, the family discussed what time we should get to T3. In normal times, 3 hours is the general guideline for international flights. I told them that news about LHR has not been the greatest. We decided to give ourselves 4 hours and we left our hotel room at 8:30am this morning. Thank goodness we did. It is now just past 11:00am and we are relaxed and waiting for our gate, praying that our flight does not get cancelled. All is on time for now. Fingers crossed. 
 
In other news, lots of reports from our FB roll call group this morning and last night of people getting home and testing positive for covid. Not great news for FR coming up. 😕

That's b/c you leave their a$$es at home when you don't cruise in SC !  LOL
[just kidding !]

Tomorrow we are going to push disembarkation as late as we can (eye roll here, yes, we are going to be “those people” this one time) because we are spending one extra day in the UK before flying home on Saturday. The rationale here was that we did not want to face a long flight home on debarkation day. Staying an extra day gives us a chance to rest and reset before flying home. 
 
As we were packing up today, Hubby said to me, “We aren’t staying in some fancy hotel tomorrow, are we?” Well, I wonder if after almost 20 years of marriage he really knows me lol. I am also willing to bet he doesn’t know we had 5 Accor Suite Night upgrades and not 4. 😉
 

Next on the Highlights of Ålesund tour was a drive to the nearby Sunnmøre Museum. The Sunnmøre Museum is an open-air museum offering historic homes with exhibits & period boats from medieval times to present.
Truth here, I stole this description from Google because this part of the tour was a bit of a dud. Our guide today was not the best, very slow and not too energetic, at this point, the family and I had about enough once we discovered what time we were due back on the bus, we headed off to do our own exploration and take pics.
D13 loved this part. It’s more green and lush compared to buildings and such. She said this was her favourite part. 
 








 
After the museum, the bus took us back to the port. Hubby stayed behind to walk around town on his own. Kids and I had enough and headed back to the ship where Leroy had my favourite room service chicken wings waiting for us. 😋