Tinbergs on Tour: August 28, 2024 – Boston, MA – Partly Cloudy

The Oceanview Café opened this morning at 6 AM and when I got up there, the place was already teeming with passengers. I was fortunate to get a decent seat and put together my usual breakfast and drink at least two cups of coffee. I also watch Eclipse sail into Boston Harbor passing alongside several islands.

Eclipse is joined here today by the Emerald Princess, docked behind us.

I brought Ellen her standard complete breakfast lox breakfast – no room service this morning.

We were able to get out of our room by 7:30 AM.

Our next stop would be a face to face meeting with CBP (Immigration) in the Foyer when our number was called (10A on our little Immigration Card). We waited to be called on Deck 5 just above Celebrity Central. The process started late and they calling two numbers at a time. At around 10:00 AM, they hadn’t reached double digits.

My wife has Jedi powers and she talked to someone and told me to come with her. We went down to the Foyer and got in line – no one asked for our little ticket and we started moving slowly toward the agents. The face to face was so brief that I think I could have given her my Costco Card and that would have been sufficient.

We then proceeded to the Terminal to find out bags. That was easy and that’s when the real craziness started.

There were several lines outside the Flynn Cruise Terminal – some people had ship transfers – some must have had Ubers and we were going to take a cab. We got into the cab line and waited for it to move – there were many more people than taxis and then the taxis stopped coming. Our flight would be boarding at 11:47AM and it was now 11:00 AM. We also noticed that people with porters were jumping the taxi line. We found out that if you hire a porter for $5 you can jump the taxi line. This little known secret really frosted people in line especially the mobility challenged person behind me. Tempers were flaring – Ellen was working with the port staff to ensure that other people weren’t jumping the line as well. Chaos defined.

There was one cab I probably would not have taken were it available.

Around 11:15 AM, we finally got a cab – the ride took a little longer than it should have – traffic – so we go to Logan around 11:40 AM. We tried to go an agent but that line was moving slowly – so I used a kiosk to print bag tags and boarding passes. An agent helped us tag our bags and directed us to another agent to check in.

We hustled to TSA PreChek which was not as long and got through there relatively quickly.

We arrived at Gate 5A at around Noon as boarding had started for our flight – AA1457. We don’t usually arrive at the gate during boarding but we made it onto the plane. If we hadn’t gotten on that cab when we did and he didn’t find a way around the traffic and if that kindly agent at Logan hadn’t assisted us in getting our bags tagged (my bad was too big to carry on), we would have been close to have those doors close on us. The immigration process on the ship probably did cause some people to miss their early flights. I am thinking that our Immigration number was called while we were in that cab on the way to Logan.

We have good seats – Cabin Extra 9A and 9B on this B737-800. The seats were comfortable and the chargers were on the seat back in front of us.

I was encouraged when I saw the slats and flaps extended on our plane - it means we were in takeoff configuration.

We taxied at normal speed to the active runway and held there,

We did take off on time and I got some nice views of Boston and vicinity on the climb out,

I had a Bloody Mary along with my lunch (maybe not the best choice of a drink) and Ellen had a Baileys. The flight was generally smooth

with the Captain maneuvering around any weather. There was some weather stuff near ORD but he took the long way around and kept it smooth. I took some pictures of our approach over Lake Michigan and on final approach to ORD.