Day 13: Tuesday, March 10, 2026

We decided last night that we weren't going to try to eat breakfast onboard, expecting to get something at LGB when we arrived and had plenty of time.  Therefore, we set the alarm for 730A, expecting that we'd be woken up long before that anyway.

Of course, we were awake by 645A, so I got up and showered, and then while E showered I made a quick swing through Windjammer to get her a few slices of her favorite bread and me a couple of cinnamon donuts.  We relaxed in our rooms until 8A, when they announced it was time to vacate.

It took the ship longer than expected to get port clearance.  As such, self-departure, slated to start around 730A, didn’t begin until a little after 8A.  What that meant is that when we walked downstairs from Deck 7 to Deck 5, with the intention of going to Schooner where Jr. Suites and up had their waiting area, Deck 5 was mobbed with a huge line running all the way back to the mid elevators.  Trying to get past all those folks and to Schooner seemed like it wasn’t going to happen, so we continued downstairs to Deck 4 figuring we could enter the theater, walk up to the balcony, and THEN make it to Schooner.

Still a madhouse.  So we simply waited in the theater (with, you know, the common folks) until deciding that we could skip the madness of Deck 5 entirely and walk down to Deck 2, where they were encouraging folks who weren’t lugging around big bags to go.  So we did that – and then had to allow two banks of elevators and ANOTHER set of stairs to merge into our line once we got down to Deck 2.

We’ve never experienced a debark that seemed this crowded before.  Not sure if it was 100% due to the delay in clearing the first round of departures or (more likely) bad traffic flow because of Quantum’s layout.  Whatever the reason, it actually took the better part of 30 minutes to get out of the ship and into the terminal to claim our luggage, then another 10 minutes or so to get through the Customs line, and finally about 15 minutes to FINALLY get into a Lyft to the airport, at which we arrived at just about 10A.  This was still plenty of time for our 1155A departure.

The flight home on Southwest was one of the few non-full flights we’ve been on in a long time.  We were chatting with one of the flight attendants about Southwest’s new assigned seating policy and I asked whether they had noticed any changes to loading times.  She said it was still hard to tell because February and March are historically slower times so hard to gauge.  What she did say was that they’d seen a dramatic drop in wheelchair requests now that seating is pre-assigned.  Turns out that they had a LOT of passengers who used to pretend that they needed wheelchairs in order to get pre- boarding and seats up front who would miraculously recover and walk off flights under their own power at the destination.  “Yeah, we’d see that all the time but, of course, we weren’t allowed to say anything about it.”  People can be such scum.

Although our row started with three of us in it, as soon as the plane was in the air our aisle seat-mate was able to move forward one row and I moved from the middle into the aisle.  The flight left a little early and we arrived at SJC about 15 minutes ahead of schedule, at 1P.  The bags were out quickly and we were calling the shuttle from the right location by 115P and at the car by 130P.

From there, we swung by Togo’s (for a shared #9) and Safeway (for ingredients for our Welcome Home dinner of BBQ chicken, baked potatoes, and salad – likely accompanied by one of our bottles of L.A. Cetto cab).  We put away vacation gear and started the first load of laundry before finally sitting down with a contented sigh at 3P.  (Actually, we first had to “spring forward” the clocks at home since we hadn’t been around to do it a couple of days earlier.)