Saturday June 13, 2026
Hi Folks! We made it home! But of course not without a couple minor hiccups. I mean what is travel these days without that?? But we made it home safely with all 47 pieces of our luggage accounted for. OK, we didn’t have that many but it felt like that!
The day started off great with us arriving into the port of Miami around 6 AM with an amazing (yep, there’s that word again!) sunrise over the city (see pics). But then it hiccuped a little bit from there. We were scheduled to get off the ship at 8 AM. But due to some customs issues and it taking longer for the Miami port operations to remove the luggage, we didn’t get off the ship until 9:45 AM!
The other hiccup was that we were flying back via standby. Which means FREE! But it only works well when there’s seats available. The open seats out of Miami looked good a few days ago but quickly went to zero, as did the ones from Fort Lauderdale! So we found open seats from West Palm Beach and decided to fly from there.
BUT… when we got to the airport, there were again zero seats available on our flight! But somehow by the grace of God (and my Guardian Angels of my mom, dad and brother) two seats magically became available and we got them. Whew!
I know what you’re thinking… you can afford to go on a World Cruise why not just buy a ticket?? First off, nothing beats Free! And saving all that money on all those free flights helped us pay for that world cruise! And yes, Kathy still works as a flight attendant and yes, I’m still mooching those free flight benefits off of her!
We landed in Charlotte around 4 PM and were home by 5:30. Yes, this has truly been a trip of a lifetime with so many great memories and so many new life long friendships made. And I know I raved about them the whole time, but those Regent singers and dancers are destined for greatness and someday we’ll be saying “we knew them when”!
I’m going to try to collect my thoughts over the next few days and post a final update then. As of now, our next trip is not until Oct when we do a 28 night cruise around Japan (our first time there!). But I have a feeling we may sneak in another trip before then. We’ll see! Hope everyone had a great day!
PS: The pic of luggage I included was just the bags we brought home with us on the plane! We still had four more large suitcases being delivered to our house by a free service Regent gives us called Luggage Forward. Sweet!
The Wandering Italian 