We didn’t want to, but alas, it was time to disembark. 😦

But we had one more excursion before our flight home to Seattle. We boarded the bus for our Everglades Airboat Ride tour, which took us to Sawgrass Recreation Park.

They had some rescue animals, like Florida panther, leopards, fennec fox, and snakes. Most of them were exotic pets that the irresponsible owners could no longer care for. It also had some alligators; one albino and one that was humongous. They also had some baby alligators that they let you hold and pet.

After looking through these animals and listening to the caretakers lectures, we went on an airboat ride on the Everglades.

We did see one alligator. Apparently, it was the first one they’d seen in several days, so I guess we were lucky, but we already saw some crocodiles in Costa Rica, so that took some excitement out of the encounter. LOL

After the airboat ride, we were supposed to get back on the bus, which will take us to the airport. However, one lady was missing. We waited for a while, but as we had a couple of people who had a flight that was leaving in less than 2 hours, we had to leave her behind. We later found that the lady somehow ended up following a different tour group… Oh well. Hopefully she eventually found her way to the airport and got reunited with her belongings that she left on our bus.

The bus dropped us off at Fort Lauderdale Airport at around 1 pm. We still had 6 hours to kill, so we decided to go to downtown Fort Lauderdale for lunch. They have a free trolley to the downtown, so we waited for it, but it wouldn’t come, so we decided to just take a taxi. Big mistake. The driver kept getting lost (probably on purpose)… After ending up in a dead end twice, we told him to just get us off. 😦

I thought we were pretty close to where we wanted to go, but because we weren’t quite sure where we started, we got lost. We walked along a pretty canal (with very expensive looking boats lined up), but we couldn’t find any restaurants we wanted to eat at. All the restaurants we passed by were full of loud, drunk people.

We hoped to run into the downtown trolley to take us back to the airport, but it never came, so we had no choice but to take a taxi again. But there were no taxis at the taxi stand. After some wait, one taxi finally came, but there were 2 other couples in front of us in the line. With no other taxis in sight, we decided to share the taxi (it was a van), even though we were all going to different places. We found that one of the couples were on the same cruise as we were, and the other couple was on a different Holland America ship. Small world.

After dropping those couples off at their hotels, we finally returned to the airport. I was hot, hungry, tired, and miserable, and was ready to go home.

As our plane took off, I saw a Holland America ship leaving the port. I couldn’t tell which ship it was (there were three Holland America ships at the port that day), but later confirmed that it was indeed Westerdam. It was nice to get one last glimpse of our ship.

And that’s the end of our cruise. I’ll post more photos and videos, as well as more detailed reviews of the ship and the ports, later.