As mentioned before, the kids read every word of the Splash Academy schedule. For this day there was a Splash Academy talent show scheduled for the afternoon with rehearsals in the morning. The kids were very clear they would not be taking part in that so we would be spending our last full day on the ship together which also meant we would try to sleep in. We managed to make it until after 8:00am which is practically noon for us.
After breakfast the kids wanted to go up to the pool deck. It was frigid up there, even in the sun. They went on a couple of the slides and spent some time on the waterslides but we went down to our room to warm up after an hour. We watched TV and warmed up until lunch before venturing out again.
After lunch we went to Dolce Gelato and The Bake Shop to get some gelato since we had some onboard credit we needed to spend. We got both gelato and some cupcakes. The gelato was okay. The cupcake wasn’t very good, but at least it didn’t cost any extra.
Getting to Know the Ropes
Tomatico wanted to try the ropes course, which surprised me because he’s generally wary of heights. He must have overcome the fears because he spent hours climbing around them with his brother.
The ropes course is on the top-most part of the ship towards the back and overlooks the pool area. It’s pretty massive and you can spend quite a bit of time traversing the course in multiple directions. There’s even a zip line portion where there’s nothing underneath you and a “walk the plank” section where you walk out on a beam over the side of the ship. The kids didn’t try that but several people were brave enough to give it a go.
Evening Entertainment
We ended up at our favorite dinner spot, the Manhattan Room, for one final dinner. The music was especially good this evening and we had a table right in front of the band. My wife got some wine with dinner to use up the last of our onboard credit.
After dinner, we wanted to catch the evening show. It was a magic/comedy show with Kyle Marlett who we were unfamiliar with but the kids knew who he was. This show didn’t have any reservations so it was first come first serve to get a seat.
They open the theater doors about half an hour before the show and we had gotten in the routine of being there when the doors open. There wasn’t normally a line and we had our choice of seats when we got in.
Tonight was not going to be like other nights. We noticed a line outside the theater about 50 minutes before showtime and sure enough people were already lining up. We promptly got in line and you could tell from the vibe of the crowd this was going to be a mad dash to get seats. We were near the front and were certain to get decent seats to matter what, but there was a lot of tension in the crowd.
People were “saving places in line” and other people were openly debating and deriding that practice. People weren’t letting other people through to their groups. Everyone seemed to have a drink, seemingly trying to get the fullest value out of their drinks package.
When the doors finally opened, it was like Walmart on Black Friday. People rushing and pushing others out of the way to get into the theater and get to a seat. We (calmly) secured decent seats about 10 rows back and watched the calamity. We thought a fistfight was sure to breakout at any moment but somehow it didn’t.
The theater was packed and still more people were coming in. Many of them stood in the back or ended up sitting on the stairs in the aisle. Yes, you read that correctly. The crew was seemingly nowhere in sight and the show proceeded with hundreds of people blocking the aisle. It was chaos and clearly a fire hazard. My guess is that the crew was afraid of an uprising if they made people leave the theater. They should have done a much better job restricting people as they entered the theater.
On top of that, the show was probably the weakest one we saw. The tricks were neat, but the performance wasn’t all that engaging overall.
Packing
After the show we headed back to our room to finish packing. The previous day while walking through the atrium, we had noticed there was information on the touchscreens about choosing a departure time (disembarkation time). The same information was in the nightly flyer we got in our room. You could start leaving the ship just before 8am if you had an early flight to catch but could chose to leave as late as 10am. Since we were headed to a hotel and wanted to avoid some of the traffic, we chose the latest time to depart. We figured it would give us more time to have a leisurely breakfast, finish packing, and we could hang out in our room until it was time to leave.
We had to pack our bags and place them outside our rooms by 11pm that night. I was able to get most of our stuff into our large suitcase which we tagged and placed outside our room. We’d pack the rest of our stuff in the morning into our rollaboard and backpacks. We’d have to carry those off ourselves.
Once we had tagged the big suitcase, we placed it outside our door. We would pick it up on the dock once we got off the ship and before going through passport control and customs.
Once packed we called it a night. Tomorrow we would wake up back in NYC.
Tomatico Travels 
You must be logged in to post a comment.