3/9 – Sea day one went well, the same routine, although today I went to a sign language class with Cole – which was totally fun and helpful (after having large deaf groups on the Insignia and NCL Gem cruises, I was interested in refreshing my skills and trying to learn more words/phrases).  I also tried Sudoku, which I quickly found out is not my cup of tea, but Kayla was so impressed I wanted to learn she gave me 3 prize stamps.  Yes!  Score!

They day wears on in normal fashion, although we are getting rumblings about more port closures….um….this time UAE.  It’s just rumors for now, but still…..we are scrambling to find information because if Dubai is closed to us, well, our options are terribly limited at this point!

3/10 – Sea day two, the bing bong we all fear has sounded again.  Anytime the Captain’s announcements come into the cabins, we know there is another situation that will throw a monkey wrench into our current plans.  And indeed, this is a big one:  UAE has closed its ports.  Holy cow!  We are supposed to disembark in Dubai.  Not anymore!  So, now the plan is to high tail it to Muscat, Oman and disembark there 3 days early.   We were originally scheduled to get there on the 13^th, but the Captain wants to be there early – by 8pm on the 12^th to “ensure we get our parking space.” (Which more than likely means behind the scenes they are worried about Oman revoking their permission to disembark there.  Have at it Captain – full steam ahead!)

Of course, though, this new chink in the armor means flying out of Oman, as opposed to Dubai, which of course is where all our (meaning almost the entire ship’s) flights originate. Pandemonium! 

But to Azamara’s credit, they gave us huge future cruise credits, free access to phone calls to call our airlines (you had to stand in line at the reception desk and it took hours, because the airlines put you on hold for hours, but still!), up to $500 per person for flight change fees – not to mention all the support and love in the world.  It was incredible.  

We booked our air through a consolidator who we couldn’t contact until after 6 pm ship time, so we tried to call Swiss Air directly, which was the airline we were to fly.  Their lines were so jammed, the call either kept ringing with no answer, or if we did get through, the call just kept disconnecting.  Occasionally we’d get a recorded message saying the lines were overloaded and to try again later.  That’s helpful!

Somehow, we had ended up in the phone line with the Concierge, Adrien, who took pity on us (mostly because we were totally chill about it and laughing with him, and smiling – where as others were a little more frayed).  He would dial the phone, then put it on speaker so we could listen while we waited, but we kept getting the recording, so he took it upon himself to keep calling Swiss over and over for us – but to no avail.  We thanked him and told him we’d just come back when we could call the consolidator, that way we wouldn’t tie up the phone any longer so others could use it.  In the meantime, Ed called Swiss air in Dubai and got connected right away, but they couldn’t do anything for us because we booked through the consolidator.  We just have to wait.

Around 5:30, we headed back to the lobby for the phone, where Adrien saw us, put us at the front of the line, gave us the phone pretty quickly and we were able to reach the consolidator who could book us on the same exact flights from Dubai to Zurich to JFK, but on 3/15 instead of 3/18.  Pretty seamless, although they couldn’t help us with the flight from Oman to Dubai, it had to be the same exact start and end city as we had originally booked.  Ok, well that just meant we still had to get to Dubai, so Adrien fired up the computer, got onto Expedia, found us an Emirates flight on 3/14 and voila! Booked and done – we paid for it, but Azamara will reimburse us.

Meanwhile, the ship is trying to get a blanket visa for all the passengers, eliminating the need to get individual visas.  We are hopeful this will work – it is the normal way to get visas, but the Captain will let us know when they have an answer.  Just one more hurdle…Oh and just in case, we can all get our photos taken by the photo staff so we will have a visa photo if necessary….they are thinking of everything!

Time for a drink!  Wow, that was just a little bit stressful – but we should be good to go now.  Our last task is to change our hotel in Charlotte and car rental to the 15th, which we can do online ourselves after dinner.  Now it’s time for a casual dinner at the Patio with Chai and copious amounts of beer and wine to celebrate getting through this day relatively unscathed.

3/11 – Sea day three was blissfully uneventful, just the normal routine. Except Oman will not allow us to get a blanket visa, which means we all have to apply individually for a visa.  Yikes!  What a nightmare!  So in between the gym, morning quiz, reading, lunch, watching a movie and trivia we went online to apply for an Omani tourist visa.  The ship staff was organizing the visa room by room, but it was taking forever – over an hour per stateroom, and Stephen kept asking guests who had internet access to apply on their own if they could.  We were going to wait for the staff, but then figured, why?  We got our visa photos and copies of our passports emailed to us from the photo staff and went online on the computer.  It took maybe 30 to 45 minutes to complete, but it was all fairly simple. Just time consuming. But it was done and we could write our cabin number on the flip chart so the powers that be can check us off the list.

Next it’s dinner and a show.  Well, maybe a show, I can’t remember now because since we’ve not been allowed to dock, we don’t have any new guest entertainers, and the one who is here – Big Red – (while wonderful) has performed her 2 shows and is now trying to get home, just like we are!  Oh, but wait, I think tonight was the cabaret with all the singers, dancers and Stephen (CD) and Geoffrey (ACD) which was fantastic.  Could have been last night…it’s all blurring together, but whichever night it was – it was excellent.

3/12 – Sea day four started out in a TOTAL PANIC as we woke up to my sister emailing and texting a screen shot of an NBC4 Breaking News alert saying Trump has suspended all travel from Europe to US for 30 days starting Friday the 13^th.  WHAT??????? Panic ensued at 6 am on a cruise ship somewhere in the Indian ocean.  We are down to Guest Relations in a flash, where there are already lines of people and more milling around in an agitated state.  Guest Relations has just found out about this as well, and they are trying to assimilate the information.  Phillip (the Hotel Director) says he has heard that American citizens are exempt, which calms everyone down, but being the researchers that we are, we need to confirm that before we are truly calm.  Crap!

We race back up to the room, get on the wifi and do confirm that US Citizens can come back to the states, but we’re still a little leery.  I mean, this is a crazy messed up situation made worse by our crazy messed up government and national leader.  What can we say?  We spend the rest of the morning doing our thing, until later that afternoon, we got a message from Swiss air telling us our flight from Zurich to JFK was cancelled.  Thank you very much.  Sigh….here we go again!  It is the middle of the night in the US and we know better than to call Swiss Air.  We know it is too early to call the consolidator, but we do manage to find an emergency email address, and would you believe – they actually emailed back right away!  We gave them all the specs and after a few hours of a bit of impatient waiting, the emergency guy actually came through spectacularly getting us a flight from Zurich to Newark.  Wow. Talk about impressive.

Then, we just needed to re-book (once again) our flights to Charlotte, now originating in Newark instead of JFK.  What a roller coaster ride.  We are hoping against hope we are done, but at this point, until we put our feet on the ground in the U. S. of A., we aren’t counting on anything.

One positive:  we received our approved Omani tourist visas today.  At least we know we can get off the ship….to where and to what, well that remains to be seen!

The rest of the day proceeds fairly calmly. We attend our last trivia, get our stamps, then queue up for our prize redemption.  Turns out we needn’t have worried about how many points we accumulated!  Zoe and Kayla are in charge of distribution, and they are just giving us one of everything.  Sweet!  We get t-shirts, pens, luggage tags, keychains, eyeglass cleaning cloths, even those cool heavy-duty magnet clips I’ve been coveting since the expo!  It’s a total haul!

Soon it’s time to head to dinner where Ryan has a surprise for us – he’s had the chef prepare Filipino food for us because we told him how much we liked it. How sweet is that? He had mentioned he had a surprise earlier on, but we couldn’t figure out what, since he is Indian, we thought maybe that, but never would we have ever guessed Filipino.  It was so thoughtful – not to mention awesomely good!  Chicken Adobo which was the tastiest thing ever, and our favorite Pancit.  An absolutely wonderful meal, one we will not forget about anytime soon.  

Leaving dinner, we see that to the Captain’s credit (and Oman), we did indeed dock at 8pm on the 12^th, so that is one hurdle handled.  Now we can spend the rest of the night hanging around, secure in the knowledge that we are hard alongside what appears to be our final port of call.