Sydney Menu A - Day 4 / Cruise - Day 1 - Boarding

We counted 4 days in Sydney; Friday to Monday. The reality is that the boarding day on Monday is always going to be wasted. In theory, we could pack up early and then go for a little trip, maybe a ferry ride, somewhere. However, that does not quite work that way with a group. You don't want to leave and come back in the last minute. We have to worry about cleaning out the fridge, or at least finish eating all the food, and transportation to the cruise terminal.

Trying to get a taxi turned out to be a problem when you don't have a local number. The first hurdle is that you cannot dial their shortened number when the only thing you have is  an international number. You simply don't have a way to  put in the country and area codes. Also, the company wants to have a contact number so that they can make confirmations and alert passengers when the ride is arriving. I even asked the Airbnb host to help. She tried but the same local number issue arises.What is not helping is that even we managed to find the local number, my roaming sim card for some reason did not allow it. So we did the last possible step: hail a taxi on the street.

We were fortunate to find a taxi relatively quickly and asked the driver to call for a van, known as maxi here. It worked out okay.

Then there is the issue of which cruise terminal. Sydney has two; the Overseas Passenger Terminal near Circular Quay and White Bay Cruise Terminal in the suburb. Our early cruise information also says White Bay. When we checked in, we never even look at the boarding pass. Turns out that it says clearly that the cruise terminal should be the Overseas Passenger Terminal. We were fortunate that there were some chatter in the WhatsApp group about that and we had at least one group member who actually looked at the boarding pass properly. The presumably final information targeting checked in passengers via email mentioned both terminals, making it totally useless.

So we managed to take the right step and got on board safely.  First impression of the ship is that it is well organized and has quality foods and entertainment.  So far so good!