The process was much faster than what I had experienced 2 years ago. I waited in my room until the steward knocked on the door. Then I left to get off the ship. There were two lines to get off, one in the front and the other in the back of deck 4. I’m sure this is because for the megaship, you have to have multiple exits to deal with that volume. They applied the same procedure for this midsize ship. Fortunately I picked the shorter one. To exit, there were two separate lines. One is for those with passports and the other is for those who used their birth certificate as proof of citizenship. I was in the passport line and they do face recognition. Their scanner didn’t recognize my face, either with or without glasses. So a 2nd person looked at my passport picture, saw that it was really me, and allowed me to proceed to retrieve my luggage and be on my way. I had an empty elevator back to the top level of the parking deck and I drove off.

I went to IHOP for breakfast instead of eat on the ship because I needed to kill time until 10am, when the Exploration Tower opened. I spent a little over an hour on a self-guided tour before heading home.