All-Nighter

On the very last day of the cruise we got a wake up call @ 6:30 in the morning, I had crashed around 3AM, and Eric kept saying he wanted to try sleeping on the lower bunk, so that night I crawled up into the top bunk. When I woke up the next morning, my mom was surprised to see me there ‘cause she thought it was Eric who climbed into the top bunk and that I was the one who never came home that night, sneaky little kid that one. Turns out he pulled an all-nighter with his new found friends, not sure what they did though, ‘cause he wasn’t even in the video that was posted.

After that all the ‘kids’ hit up the buffet at around 8 and got together for one last hurrah. When 9AM came, we all headed back to our respective rooms to grab our luggage, and once again, we were hit with approximately 3,000 passengers trying to get out of 1 set of double doors. As you’re going out, you have to be swiped out too, to ensure that there are no stowaways. Once you get out, you got to find your luggage and go through customs, by the time we got to our bus and took off it was already 10:30.

We were the first bus to leave the marina, and according to our tour guide we were making great time and that we would be back at Commerce Gate around 10PM, even though we kept stopping every 2 hours for a washroom break or a food break. I just understand why we couldn’t have done both at the same time. We stopped for dinner at around 6, and then about an hour or so later, we stopped at the border to shop at the duty free shop, and we stayed there for about an hour. Wouldn’t you know it! There’s a Tim Horton’s there and get this! It has a restroom!

His defense was that he knew the border would be packed, since most people are returning from their holidays and he wasn’t sure how long we’d be stuck there, so he needed to let us go eat first, ‘cause our bus was full of old people, and people tend to get cranky when they are hungry.

So we’re coming out of the duty free shops and there is only 1 lane for buses and cars and 1 lane for cars only, with one final lane for trucks. The crossing guard removes some pylons so that our bus can get through, so our driver decides to use this to his advantage and ride the truck lane all the way down and merge at the very end. We get close enough to the border and we see a uniform officer get up and walk towards the bus, we think “uh-oh” he’s going to lecture us, but instead he goes the car that we’re trying to get ahead of and both the tour guide and driver think that we’re scott free, that he’s telling her car to let us merge. WRONG! He probably just told the car, “don’t worry, I’ll take care of this” and he goes up to our driver to ask him what he is doing and tells him that it’s not fair for everyone else who had to wait in line etc etc. So our tour guide plays dumb, he said “sorry, sir, I didn’t know” But border patrol isn’t dumb, so he says “listen, if I pull up your records, I’m sure it’ll say that you’ve been through here many times” So our tour guide goes “yes, yes, I have been but my driver is new, he didn’t know, I so sorry!” So long story short, they send a patrol car over and we get escorted back to the states and we have to do our trek all over again, sure time flew in this entire process, but it also cost us about 30-45 minutes.

We get back to commerce gate at midnight! I get a phone call from Ivy’s dad and turns out his bus got back at like 10PM, right on time! Rumor has it that they skipped the dinner pit stop, which saved them a bunch of time.