March 16, 2025 Tampa disembark the ship
Constellation was docking before 6:30 a.m. Passengers started to disembark in Tampa at Terminal 3 shortly after 7 a.m. The sun had not risen yet, but the sky was cloudy, temperature was 23°C and wind was SSE 18 km/hr. It was a dull day. There is a storm warning for later this afternoon for the Tampa Bay area, but further north there are tornado warnings and storm warning all the way north to Buffalo, New York on Lake Ontario.
Our time to disembark was 9 a.m. since we are staying in Tampa and will fly out early Monday morning. Claire had a mild sore throat in the morning that didn’t cause any problems. There are other storms in Canada and covering many states in the U.S.
We had packed everything last night so it was just our backpacks and computer case to take with us to breakfast in the main dining room on Deck 4 just after 7:15 a.m., we missed the lineup that was 15 minutes later. After breakfast we climbed to the upper level of the main dining room on Deck 5, where Elite, Elite Plus and Zenith passengers could wait with the bonus of being out of the lines and having coffee and pastries available and sitting at tables. We played a game of Five Crowns while we waited for our number to be called. The Elite etc. passengers also get a five minute advance notice of when their number will be called. Once we collected our luggage we just walked past an Immigration officer who asked us to look into a facial recognition camera. All passengers had been screened this way when they boarded the ship to start the cruise.
There were hundreds of people outside the terminal waiting for rides or being directed to the airport shuttles. There were a line of taxis and Uber/Lyft cars. Some people were walking to the nearby parking lot to retrieve their cars. Since it was a good walking temperature, we decided to walk the 1.8 km section of the Tampa Riverwalk in the opposite direction than we had walked last Sunday afternoon. At the Aloft Hotel, on Ashley and Kennedy, we booked a Lyft which came within ten minutes to go to our hotel. The drive to our airport area hotel was less than 15 minutes. We arrived a few minutes before the breakfast buffet was to finish. We were encouraged to select something for tomorrow’s breakfast since the buffet would not open until 6 a.m. and we registered for the shuttle to arrive at 5 a.m. to take us to the airport for our 7:25 a.m. flight. Checking the Tampa departures, after we checked in online for our flight, 90% of flights since 11 a.m. were delayed one to four hours due to the weather warnings. Most of the flight were to cities in the states affected by tornado warnings.
We had to wait for a room to be ready, but had Silver status so when a room became available the clerk assigned it to us and we took our things there about 1 p.m. We amused ourselves playing more games of Five Crowns or reading Saturday’s paper on our phones.
The Bahama Breeze Caribbean restaurant was just across the parking lot, we thought we would scout it out for dinner. Once there we decided that we would have an early lunch/dinner because of the weather forecast. Larry had a beer from Aruba with his roasted Jerk Chicken with yellow rice while Claire had a salad which included chicken, grapes, strawberries, pineapple and lettuce.
We returned to the hotel and read some more and checked the storm notices on the TV. The thunder and lightning storm started just after 4 p.m. The few hours produced lots of lightning, thunder and heavy rain. We were glad we didn’t need to go out even though we had rain gear, including umbrellas.
The system should be finished around 9 p.m. well before we go to the airport early tomorrow morning.
We called it an early night since we will be getting up at 4:30 in the morning.
Total steps: 7,454
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