This morning, we left our hotel in Frankfurt and boarded the train back to Hamburg, to check into our MSC cruise of 7 nights. We booked 2 rooms in the Yacht Club so we are beyond excited.
Our train ride was uneventful. We had figured out how to snatch the best seats on the train by now – not all First class seats are the same, some have doors, some have tables. We were able to get ourselves a nice table with nice seats.
We arrived right on schedule, then hailed a taxi and we were on our way to the cruise port. The driver didn’t speak a lot of English but that’s ok. Just as we were able to reach the ship, Teddy asked me if I had all of the paperwork. What paperwork? I booked everything through the travel agent. We didn’t have a printer. The travel agent said that’s ok. They’ll have everything for us at the cruise terminal. Teddy said, “Passport?” PASSPORT!! PASSPORT!!!!!!! THE PASSPORTS ARE IN THE HOTEL SAFE IN FRANKFURT!!!!!!
The pit in my stomach… It’s the worst feeling no words can describe. The driver didn’t understand what was going on but he knew something was going on. Ava and the driver started speaking in German to one another. The driver suggested maybe we could board the ship with the photocopies of our passports, which I did have. So we decided to try.
At the pier, I begged and pleaded. No use. They would not let us board. They told me to go back and retrieve our passports and board on the next port, day after tomorrow, in Zeebrugge.
There’s still 5 hours left before the ship leaves today, but that’s not enough time for us to do a round trip. Later on, I learned about the emergency document delivery service called Time Matters. I’m not sure if it would have helped us, but it was too late by the time I learned about this option.
Like a bunch of deflated balloons, we left the pier and rode back to the train station, paid for another set of train tickets, booked another night at the same hotel, then some more train tickets for next day to Blankenberge, Belgium, then another night in a hotel.
To make our trip to Belgium slightly better, we purchased first class tickets and was able to secure a private room.
We got off the train in Blankenberge, and spent the night at Hotel Helios. We booked a family room which was spacious and comfortable, but the regular rooms have an amazing ocean view. We got in pretty late so it was pretty dark out but the hotel is right across the street from the ocean.
Blankenberge was quite cold at night so we were freezing when we walked the beach a bit, but it was nice to feel the ocean after all the days cooped up inland.
Picardie
For dinner, we ate at the restaurant next door, Picardie. It was a nice little seafood restaurant and the food was delicious.
The best thing that came out of this unexpected interruption, was that we were able to walk to a laundromat nearby and washed all of our clothes. We had pretty much ran out of clean clothes by this point because our trip was supposed to be OVER by now, and doing laundry on the cruise ship would have been pretty expensive, so this worked out well.
Doing laundry in a foreign country has its own challenges of course. We didn’t understand Dutch so the directions on all the machines were foreign to us. We had to just guess and make things work. At the end, it all worked out.
The hotel had free breakfast which wasn’t too bad. The small town of Blankenberge was surprisingly charming. Food (and laundry) was expensive. People were easy to talk to although I couldn’t find anyone willing to make change of my large bills to use at the laundromat. (I did not try at the hotel because we were told the laundromat would accept credit card.) The locals spoke Flemish, which sounded quite different from Dutch, even though it’s technically the same language. The service everywhere we encountered was very good, and the taxi to the cruise port was easy and efficient. We were at the cruise port shortly before 11am and I was happy to see the same individual that told me 2 days earlier that we could board at this port. They checked our passports and we were on the ship right after 11am!