I woke up Thursday morning with a list a mile long! Clean the house, do laundry, finish packing kids and myself, get a few groceries to take my friends house for kids, send out a few emails, arrange to have lawn mowed, and on and on.
I got a good start on it, then got a horrible phone call at about 10:00 am. A recorded message from American Airlines telling me that my flight for that evening had been cancelled and I was rescheduled on flight on Friday...that would get me in after the cruise left port.
I freaked out. I panicked. Darin was gone and I didn't know what number to call. The waterworks were going strong. My sweet Jordan came and gave me a hug and told me it would be ok. Luckily the number from the airlines was on my phone. I waited and waited and finally got someone on the line. I was able to get on a flight at 3:30. I immediately called Carla and asked to bring the kids over about 5 hours earlier. She said of course, so I got on with my work.
I felt bad since I was not spending any time with the kids, but I was trying to get the house ready so the house could be shown over the weekend.
I finally got everything done, got the kids to Carla's and got to the airport. It was so nice to casually go through the airport by myself!! No chasing kids!!
I made it to Miami with no problems and hung out in the hotel until Darin got back from his reception.
Friday
We woke up and had breakfast in the hotel-which was quite pleasant with out having to wrangle children- then drove around Miami for a while. It was interesting to see the city. We drove through "little Havana" which was interesting. I noticed that the buildings were all very light in color-mostly in the orange range of color. Spencer would have loved it. I also noticed that they like to have gates and hedges between all the houses.
We made our way to the cruise ship and waited in line to get on. I was so excited. Could hardly believe that we were actually there!! It took a while, then we finally made it on board. It was so weird to think that it was actually a ship-seemed like a huge building. There were 14 floors on the ship! And it was the smallest ship in the whole of Royal Carribean's fleet. And we were told it was twice the size of the Titanic, which was weird-the Titanic seemed so huge on the movie.
Here I am walking down the big hallway leading to the entrance to the ship.
I know our room, cabin, or stateroom-whatever you would like to call it, would be small, and I was right:) And the bed was up against the wall, and guess who had to crawl in and out-yup, me. After we found our room, we hurried up to the buffet, called the "Windjammer" to get in lunch before they closed. Holy food. What people say about cruises is true. They have lunch, then they have "snack" about an hour later, but it is more like another whole meal!!
We were in room 5011 on the 5th floor. We were on the main hall, which was way better than the tiny little hallways to the inside. We didn't have a window, but the ones on our floor just looked at the lifeboats anyhow.
A view of our room, or should I say cabin. Our cabin steward was named Cassanova. He was excellent.
We walked around after that, then went to a "first time cruisers" meeting. It was interesting. That is actually where we learned the facts about the ship. We were on one of the decks and the clouds looked pretty ominous. Soon it was pouring down rain, so the welcome dance party had to be moved inside. We watched a bit, then went back to our room to get ready for dinner.
Are we going to cruise right into a storm?
Yes, we would go right through a storm. Can you see the rain. It was pouring down.
I liked the flag blowing in the wind.
We were assigned to a dining room called Moonlight, and sat at table 305. The first night there was a funny couple from Silver Spring MD and we got along great. But they were somehow separated from their family, so we had a different couple the second night. They were from Philadelphia and it was the first time they had been anywhere outside of Philly-first plane ride as well. They were funny-you could tell they hadn't gotten out much. But they were nice and we had 2 nice dinner with them. Our waiter was Marco from Mexico, and his assistant was Nikolina from Croatia. They were excellent.
After dinner, we went to the "Welcome Aboard" show. It had the "Royal Carribean Singers and Dancers," and then a really funny comedian. We really enjoyed ourselves. The theater was pretty cool. We walked around a bit on the upper decks, then called it a night.
