San Juan, Puerto Rico

The flights from Calgary to San Juan via Atlanta can be described as a luggage mix-up royale. In Calgary it took us an hour and a half to complete check in before we cleared customs and security for our flights, most of which was spent standing in a long sinuous line. We were told they were having difficulty with the baggage tag system. We eventually made it to our gate and boarded but sat on the tarmac for over an hour while they dealt with, you guessed it: luggage. In Atlanta we again sat over an hour on the tarmac. This time they had loaded our plane with the entire wrong luggage cargo that needed to be off loaded before ours was loaded. Arriving in San Juan, after all this, we were sure our luggage would be somewhere else so we were quite relieved when we saw our bag come on the carousel. There was a Viking Cruise Lines rep waiting right at the airport baggage claim so we were taken care of from there on. After a short bus ride to the pier we found that the process to get on the ship went very smoothly but it was still 2:45 am before we got into our room. There was a lovely selection of sandwiches and desserts in our room– nice touch – we were hungry. Our first off ship excursion was booked for 7:30 so as you can guess we skipped that one. After a fairly good, though not long sleep, we went off to explore the ship. Many features – libraries, piano lounges, pools, etc. A very nice theatre which was empty this morning so Doug checked it out and decided he could lecture there. We stopped at one of the buffet restaurants for lunch and met a couple from Nashville. We are due to sail out of San Juan this afternoon at 5 or so. Afternoons and evenings have so many activities: lectures, concerts, etc. that it is hard to choose which to go to. We will let you know what we did in tomorrow’s entry. We will include some random pictures taken around our 900 passenger ship, the “Viking Sea” in some blog entries.