Day 8 Nice and home

We had to set a alarm this morning as they wanted us out of our rooms by 8.30 but we could stay on until 12 if we wanted but as we had a flight to catch we agreed to meet at 8.30 with our luggage and go for breakfast which we did. Afterwards we said goodbye to the restaurant staff and walked off at about 10am. We called 2 Ubers, one for to the airport and one for the guys to their hotel for the night before they fly back to Houston.
We said goodbye to each other and took the short but really scenic drive to the airport. Nice is beautiful, and it was sunny and warm, so we were very happy we wore shorts, we got to the airport checked in but as we were walking to departures, security started to shout and ask everyone to evacuate the building. There had been numerous announcements about an unattended case in the departure lounge, but as it had not been claimed, it became a security risk. At this point we could see the hotel JJ and Brandon were staying in, so we called them to tell them what wasgoing on, it wasn’t long before we were allowed back in and as we all pushed through the doors we coukd see Rudi and Jennifer they had not checked in yet so we said goodbye again and went through security, this took ages as they were checking so many of the carry on bags. We thought we could possibly miss our plane. Well, that turned out to be completely wrong as our plane was delayed at first by 1 hour. Then, when that passed, it turned into 2, and we eventually got onboard and was told there was going to be another delay of up to 2 hours. We had to stay on the plane and sit it out. We had a connecting flight in Lisbon to Faro but we were not going to catch that, so we were trying to work out the best way to get home, the other problem was as we were flying TAP all the way, our bags were checked in all the way and our missed flight would mean we were pushed onto the later flight at 11pm we will now need to tell TAP when we land we want our bags back and get a taxi to the train station and catch a 3 hour train back home. So we landed at a little past 5pm so the fast train was completely out of the question so we rushed down to lost luggae to tell them we needed our bags off the next flight and was told that it could take a while, while we were waiting we were looking at alternative ways to get home there was a last train at 6.32pm yes you heard me last train at that time, so we knew we could get back providing the bags got to us by 6ish, well that didnt happen in fact we were waiting nearly 2 hours for them to eventually turn up, so now no trains the FlexBus was full and quite frankly the only option was to hire a car or stay until 11pm to catch the flight, well we didnt want anything to do with TAP so we wentfor the hire car, we walked to the desks and got a Sixt car for 137 Euros witrh one way drop off in Albufeira, honestly this is exactly what happened to us on a cruise last year with lornas parents we ended up missing the flight and all trains buses were booked and we had to take a car, so we eventually got in our fron door at 10:15pm we started travelling at 10:00am this morning but that was French time so we have been travelling for 13 hours to get back from bloody Nice.
The whole experience has been amazing, and it has now secured our thoughts on large cruise ships that we would now keep to smaller ships where possible. It was great to see the guys again. we always have a blast with them and look forward to our next cruise with them in November on the MSC yacht club.

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