The short story…we made it to Venice, and are comfortably settled into our spacious Superior Veranda Suite; stateroom number 6113 aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam.
The long story…I will attempt to limit the profanity that may be necessary to retell the tale that leads up to the comfortable settling in to our room aboard the ship; however I am not making any promises. So…where to begin? I suppose the beginning is as good a place to start as any. Melauna and I left OKC around 11:15 to drive down to Dallas DFW airport to meet up with Mom and Lyn to catch our 5:40 flight to Madrid. We were successful in making our Rendevouz point in Grapevine and caravanning to the airport with plenty of time to spare prior to our 5:00 boarding time. So, 5:00 comes and goes without any announcement of boarding our flight, then 5:15…5:30…when finally the departure time magically changes to 6:00 which is then updated to 6:20. We finally boarded the plane at 6:30 for our now newly updated departure time of 6:40. A quick note on the boarding procedure…chaos. Our seats were on rows 22 and 23, by the time that we actually found any place to stow our carry on luggage, it was scattered in bits and pieces from row 8 through 30 and if you have ever tried to swim upstream on a fully booked Boeing 767 you know the frustration. But finally, all our bags are stowed to the satisfaction of the FAA and we are nestled into our two square feet of real estate that we will enjoy for the next nine hours and fifteen minutes…that is until the captain comes over the intercom system to inform us, in his polished American Airlines captainspeak…”uhh ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking…blah, blah, blah….both navigation systems appear to be inoperable making it difficult to steer across the Atlantic and arrive safely in Spain…so grab your shit that you just spent the last 30 minutes trying to cram in any available space aboard this no navigating, overbooked tin tube and get the hell out!” I don’t recall if those were his exact words, but I think that is close. So back off the plane we go and are herded back to the pre-flight corral, blissfully mooing as we go. From my bay in the pre-flight corral, I see that our new scheduled departure time is set for 8:30. Yep, you guessed it…8:30 comes and goes and we are still sitting amongst our hay and poo. At 9:00 we try this whole flying thing again, this time with a different plane. At 9:40, a mere four hours from our scheduled departure time, we go wheels up. By the way, I should mention that immediately following our captain’s navigation bombshell, Melauna grabbed her iPhone thingy and changed our connecting flight in Madrid to a later time…some quick thinking that saved us a lot of standing in line time as well as the possibility of having that flight booked up.
After finally getting in the air, the flight to Madrid goes according to plan with no further delays, arriving at about 2:00, giving us plenty of time to catch our 4:10 flight to Venice. So we make our way to our departure gate, which apparently was planned to be the furthest possible point from our arrival gate. That was handy. We make it to the gate to be told that we needed to go to the Iberia Check In desk to obtain our boarding passes. Where is the Iberia Check-In desk you ask? Well, it is technically still in Madrid, but just. So we make the trek back across the airport and receive our boarding passes so that we can head all the way back to the departure gate. By the time that we finally make it to the departure gate, the plenty of time that we had had dwindled down to scant seconds before missing the flight. But alas, we did make the flight and arrived in Venice at 6:30.
Finally, we had made it. Just a quick walk down to retrieve our checked luggage and we were off to the Nieuw Amsterdam to begin our adventure. After checking the monitors, we find that our luggage is to be spit out of whirly thing number 5. Where is whirly thing number 5? Oh, it’s the last one at the faarrrttthest point from where you are standing…can you see it?…way down there? We make it to the #5 whirly and stand around waiting for our luggage to be ejected…and we waited…and we waited. I checked the monitors again to ensure that there wasn’t a mistake in my whirly selection to see the notice that all luggage associated with Iberia flight 3306 from Madrid has been properly ejected. What the hell? Surely not. But yet, surely so. Yes, they had lost all of our checked baggage. So, Melauna and I go to speak with the Italian authorities regarding our misplaced worldly possessions. After waiting in line for 45 minutes due to all of the other fellow bovine that had just had their worlds rocked, we were able to speak with a friendly Iberian associate about reclaiming our, oh I don’t know…CLOTHES AND STUFF FOR THAT WE THOUGHT WE MIGHT WEAR FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS…Fortunately we were told that they knew exactly where the luggage was and would be able to deliver it to the ship in the morning before we sailed. Since everything else having to do with the airlines had so flawlessly been executed, I have little worry that our luggage will arrive just when they told us.
Prior to departing on this adventure, we had procured the services of Venice Limo to escort us from the airport to the cruise ship. And so, after signing all of the requisite paperwork for our lost luggage, we exited Marco Polo International Airport and lo and behold our driver is there holding a sign with my name beautifully stenciled on heavy stock Old World cloth parchment that Venice is so famously known for….Oh wait…I’m sorry, that was what I was expecting. The lack of sleep over the past 36 hours is beginning to blur the lines between desire and reality…no, he was there, which I suppose is a small miracle in light of the everything else that had or had not happened, and he did indeed have a sign with my name on it that appeared to have been written on a sheet of notebook paper with a Mark-A-Lot held between his toes. Whatever, just get us to the frigging ship already. So, it is quickly apparent that he is as conversant in English as I am in Italian. After Buongiorno, our conversation had run its course. This hacked me off somewhat because the Venice Limo website specifically stated that all of its drivers were fluent in English. I suppose fluent is a subjective term. Anyway, after a 15 minute drive we have our ship in sight. We pull up to the embarkation terminal and begin to unload our carry-on luggage. “Finally” I sigh quietly to myself…”We made it”. A smile begins to form across my beard stubbled face. It is 8:00 p.m. on the nose, and interestingly enough, the embarkation terminal closes at 8:00 p.m. So as we were unloading our bags, those sneaky Italian embarkation bastards were closing up shop. We get everything unloaded, turn around and…what the hell? Are you kidding? Nope. Closed. So now, the whole language barrier starts to come into play. Our driver goes and talks with someone, comes back and shrugs his shoulders. That I understand, shoulder shrugging is a gesture that knows no borders. In fact if a Martian had landed at the Venician Port Authority at that moment and shrugged his shoulders, I would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on. So, I shrug my shoulders back at the driver and he begins talking to me in Italian. In reply, I tell him “No comprende”. He groans, looks around and decides on a different tack. He tries speaking to me in Italian…oh wait, he just tried that. I reply with “No comprendo” this time, thinking “No comprede” may have in fact been Spanish and “No comprendo” would clear everything up. In response I got another groan, which I take as a victory, since I was able to convey in a language other than my own to this guy what my thoughts were…”I don’t understand”, while he had failed miserably in conveying anything to me other than a should shrug, which, as we have established, even a creature from outerspace could comprehend. So, as a last ditch effort, he tries speaking in Italian again. Maybe bolstered by my flawless “no comprendo”. This time, I tried “I….DONT…..SPEAK…..ITALIAN!” That seemed to work. He walked off. It at least worked in the sense that he didn’t try any Italian on me again. Finally I see him waiving in the common “come here!” motion. Got it! Gestures work so much better than words. A gesture is really hard to screw up. We finally are handed off to some folks that speak a little English and begin our “backdoor” check in to the ship that at this point I am really beginning to wonder if we will ever board.
Another 45 minutes and we are checked in, loaded into the Holland America network, had our pictures taken (I’ll admit that I have looked better at this point), given key cards for our rooms and are sent off with a smile. We make it to our staterooms at straight up 9:00 in dire need of sleep and sustenance. We opted for the main dining room and I will apologize to all for my presence in the splendid Manhattan Dining Room looking like roadkill in shorts. Really, I am sorry. I am one of those that would have leered down my nose had I seen myself walking in there looking like that. Hopefully you understand. Dani, our waiter was superb, as were all of our meals. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed all of the courses that were offered. After dinner, and hugs and kisses to Mom and Lyn, we made our way back to our rooms to sleep off what had been quite an eventful day and a half.
So, now here it is 1:00 a.m., or as we say in Oklahoma, 6:00 in the afternoon, wide awake but comfortably snuggled into our room aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam.
So far so good…
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