Grand Africa Cruise - Our Last Day at Sea

Cruise Day 71

Monday, December 19, 2022

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure, self-determined, self-motivated, often risky, forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world.”  -- Mark Jenkins

Today is our last sea day and the last day of our cruise.  We are looking forward to getting home, but it still feels sad that the cruise is ending.

With the extra hour of sleep last night, we were both up by 8:00 and after breakfast in the Neptune Lounge, we were ready to start packing in earnest.  We spent a couple of hours getting most of the packing done, but we still have a bit to do this afternoon.

I woke up early and saw a red glow through an opening in the window shade so got up to investigate and saw an amazing sunrise.  I'll admit to a little color enhancement in the editing, but it was a spectacular sunrise to see.

We have bought quite a few things on this trip so packing is a bit of a challenge, but we did bring an extra duffel bag with us that we will use and ship things home.  We also have our Holland America duffel bags that we received last night, but we won’t need them (hopefully).

The weather has cooled so we spent the rest of the morning relaxing on the balcony.  We must be on a regular cruise route as we passed three different cruise ships headed east this morning.

After lunch we walked through the casino and spent a little money and then Val returned to our room to finish up her packing.  I hadn't taken many pictures of the ship and wanted to get some of the Christmas decorations, so I wandered around for a bit taking pictures before returning and finishing my packing.  By late afternoon we were all done, except for some things that we’ll have to pack after dinner tonight.

We relaxed for the rest of the day until it was time for our last dinner of the cruise.  We said goodbye to our dining stewards, Tama and Tony, and then headed off to our final visit to the casino.

Val and I continued our winning ways and played for quite a while.  In the casino, all the transactions are done through your room key card.  You load money for the casino onto your card from your shipboard account and when you win it saves it to your card.  What you can’t do is transfer money back to your shipboard account so on the last night you have to cash out any casino money you have left over from the cruise by 11:00 PM or you lose it.  For the first time ever, Val and I both had a decent amount of money on our cards to cash out so before going back to our room we took care of that.  Unfortunately, you can’t transfer money back to your ship board account so we had to take the money in cash.  We didn’t come out ahead on the cruise, but our luck these last few nights significantly lessened our losses.

Once back to our room, we did the last minute packing except for our clothes and our toiletry items we would need to get ready tomorrow.  All luggage that you don’t want to carry off the ship yourself has to be out in the hallway before 11:00 PM and the next time you will see it will be in the terminal tomorrow morning.

Because this is such a long cruise, everyone has quite a bit of luggage and we were no exception.  We had four bags that were going to be shipped by Luggage Forward plus two bags that we would check on the plane.  When I put our bags out, the hallway was already full of luggage, I feel sorry for the poor people hauling all that luggage away.  

Tomorrow morning we arrive in Fort Lauderdale at 7:00 AM and our cruise will be over.  We set the alarm for 6:30 and called it a night.  We are both looking forward to getting home, but we are also feeling sad the cruise is coming to an end.