Getting out of the USA…
27 October 2007
As I sit and write this I have been off the ship for almost a week and have “taken the day off” to catch my breath, have the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in 6 months and sit and do a little planning for the next few days. But the key thing is that I am off the ship and on my own and what a strange feeling it is. No doubt you’re familiar with the idea of a prisoner spending so long in jail that they are unable to cope with being released. The feeling as I got off was something akin to that. Suddenly I had gone from a situation where my day was planned to a startling degree, everything from when I ate and worked to where and when I slept, who I spoke to and when I went to the toilet. Now I find myself in a room that seems massive and empty, with a bed I can sit up in without hitting my head and a bathroom all of my very own. I can wake up when I want, within reason if I want to catch the shuttle bus, eat when I want to and not have to worry about having the light on or the volume up to far.
Of course the flip side is that I now have to make decisions. I can’t just leave my laundry for the cabin steward, I have to take the time to count my socks and underwear, figure out how long they will last and make plans for when to wash them. I can’t just eat as much as I want, I have to order and, worst of all, pay for what I want. The variety means more decisions in what to choose and when to choose it. I even have to decide on which t-shirt to wear! While I had set today aside to write I have spent most of the morning just lounging around in my boxer shorts with the TV on waiting for a reason to start. Maybe I should have written out a roster and taped it to the wall so I’d know what to do and when to do it.
Living a normal life is a surprisingly complex thing to do and not something you can appreciate until you’ve had the opportunity to not do it for a while. I’m beginning to see why so many people say that they are going to do “one more” contract. It’s so much easier to just turn up on the ship and have everything taken care of for you. A very comfortable thing that I could easily get used to myself. The things that used to worry me at home become much less important and were it not for my house and the need for somewhere to put all of the things I’ve been buying in Walt Disney World I could see myself falling into the gilded cage of a life at sea.
I have just gotten back from eating at an Ihop, a fast food restaurant chain that just happens to be right next door to the Howard Johnson where I’m staying. This is a good thing because it is p***ing down at the moment and, of course, I have to walk everywhere. It may have been the most tasteless steak I have ever eaten but there was so much food on the plate, along with the soup starter and the bottomless coke that the $21 price tag for it all seemed really reasonable.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back a week to when I was getting off the ship.
Being a sea day I worked all of the day before and didn’t finish until about 3 in the morning. The awkward part was that I was required to have my bags inspected by security and stored the night before I was getting off and that meant I had to keep the clothes I was going to wear out of my bag as well as the uniform for the day and then pack all of it into my carryon bag. On the Carnival ship where I’d spent my first week I had to manhandle my bags off with me when I disembarked, making packing easier but making for a bit more work in narrow corridors and down the gangway. Princess had other ideas and I didn’t see my bags (note the plural now) from when I surrendered them Saturday night to when I collected them after customs on the dock Sunday morning.
The smart thing to have done would have been to have gotten some sleep before I got off but after eating for a last time with my long suffering cashier partner Maria and then a couple of drinks and some parting handshakes in the crew bar I really only had time for a few hours and even that was lacking in quality. I knew I was in for a long 24 hours until I got to my hotel in Orlando and trying to force myself to sleep was the worst thing I could have done. If there is one thing that doing the graveyard shift for all these years has taught me it’s that it is much easier to stay awake when you’re tired than to sleep when you’re not. Now there’s a quote for all those little calendars.
Looking around the cabin that last time was a strange feeling. It had been home for so long and now it seemed so empty without any of the little things of mine that I had gotten so used to seeing and having as an essential part of the character of the room. It may not have been tidy necessarily but with Jon having already taken over the bottom bunk and having folded the top one up against the wall it looked a lot bigger and suddenly foreign. Nesting isn’t something that I’ve ever considered myself as doing but I guess everyone feels the need to personalise the space they live in and now the cabin had nothing to show that I had even been there. Maybe I should have carved my initials into the desk or something.
From the cabin I waited with about 30 or 40 other leavers in the crew bar until customs were ready for us. Then we all walked down the stairs for the last time and then down the gangway and out onto the dock. I was pushed to the front of the line because I was the only one not going to the Miami airport and would need an individual taxi to get me to the Fort Lauderdale airport rather than the bus everyone else would be on. A somewhat perfunctory check by customs and immigration and I was outside and into a taxi with a company paid voucher. The last view of the ship I called home for so long was through the advertising sign in the back window of the taxi and it was with little fuss and absolutely no fanfare that I made my way to the first leg of my journey home. Now I just had an 8.5 hour wait at the airport.
8.5 hours! All the planning I had done to get to Walt Disney World had come down to the fact that I was not allowed to stay in the US once I got off the ship. The visa I had didn’t allow it and I was required to exit the country that day. The easiest and cheapest thing was for me to fly to the Bahamas and then fly back again. Look at a map and Nassau is surprisingly close to Florida so the flight was only an hour but, needing the cheapest option, there were few flights to choose from. I ended up with one that left at 8pm and I was at the airport at 11.30 am with no possibility of even checking my bags in for another 4 hours. All I could do was find a comfortable looking piece of floor and camp out until the check in queue for my flight opened. I don’t know how many times I heard the announcements about the security level being orange and that I shouldn’t leave my bags unattended or have liquids or gels over a certain size but I can almost still quote them word for word. I don’t think I slept as such but at least I got to sit down and lean against my bags in some degree of comfort. Needing to use the little boys room was becoming more and more of a concern as time went on however and I wasn’t prepared to drag all my luggage into the toilet until necessity made it unavoidable. Luckily I survived until check in.
Checking in was interesting. The check in guy kept pecking away at his computer and then he called someone over, pointed at the screen and asked them if they had ever seen this before. When they said no someone else was called over and they couldn’t help either. Then he moved to another terminal and still kept pecking away. The whole time this is happening I’m imagining that he’s just trying to kill time until the cops/security/FBI/Army arrive to take me away to Cuba as a suspected terrorist. I suddenly realised that I had stamps from China and Egypt in my passport, both of which are probably on some sort of watch list. Eventually, though, whatever the problem was went away and he managed to get me sorted out. It was at this point that I agreed to something I later grew to regret. He said that he could check my bags all the way through, back to Orlando, so that I wouldn’t have to collect them in Nassau. I thought this was a great idea since I hadn’t bothered booking a room in Nassau, figuring that I was only going to be there a few hours and would just sit in the airport until the return flight. Not having my big bags would be one less hassle and I’d realised just how much of a hindrance to biological functions they could be. He, however, strongly suggested that I collect them and hang on to them because he was wary of the security arrangements they may have storing my bags between flights. I ended up agreeing with him and the bags were checked to Nassau were I would collect them. I planned to just put them into a locker and then hit the casino for the time I had there anyway.
Leaving the check in counter, with some relief I found a men’s room and then grabbed something to eat and a drink in one of the overpriced fast food places that seem to be even more prevalent in American airports than boarding gates. That was when I was reintroduced to the American concept of portion size. I can eat with the best of them but even I have a struggle putting away a good sized American meal and I’d gotten used to a buffet where I could get just the right amount of food for the mood I was in. Here I was presented with a gargantuan plate and mounds of fries, cheese sticks and a burger that looked much better than it ultimately tasted. The best part was the bottomless coke.
Now with just 3 hours to kill I decided to head to the gate. A good decision as it turned out. The line to get through customs and the security check were horrendous. Luckily/unluckily for me I was grabbed almost immediately and whisked to the front of the line where I got “special” treatment. I was picked for extra attention. I was given a pat down and my pack was carefully checked over inside and out as well as being checked for explosive residue. Holding my pants up with one hand (having surrendered my belt at the metal detector) and juggling all my other belongings in the other hand I moved on and, despite any physical violation I may have felt, I skipped ahead of the majority of people in the queue.
Sitting at the gate I read/dozed for the next few hours until it was time to board the plane and as a pleasant surprise it turned out to be a propeller driven plane. The last time I had flown on something that wasn’t jet powered was when I was taking flying lessons so I really enjoyed the hour flight time, being able to look out the window at the blur of the props. Unfortunately that was to be the last pleasant thing that happened to me for a while.
Greg