Today is the big day! We are headed to the ship! We have a shuttle booked at 10:30am and I have to pack up the room. So, I woke everyone up early and sent them to the park for Early Entry hours and I got everything ready to get to the ship. Transition days are always the hardest and now we have 13 suitcases and 7 carry ons. I did a pretty good job of getting stuff ready and actually had one almost empty suitcase, so I was happy with that. I was all packed up by 9am and had the bellman come and store the luggage and I headed off to the park. I was surprises that the shops in Downtown Disney were mostly closed as I wanted to buy a few pins etc. I headed into the park and wondered around Main Street for awhile. Then I headed over to a shop and found all the pins I wanted! Meanwhile the kids had done a bunch of rides! Casey and Sarah went on Splash Mountain 2 times in a row without getting off as no one was in line. That was awesome for them!
We then rode the monorail back and headed to Concierge to say good bye and to grab our carry ons. We got outside exactly at 10:30 and our shuttle was waiting for us. Yippee! We loaded all our bags in and off we went! It was about a 45 minute ride and we could finally see our ship! FINALLY! We pulled up and our bags were taken away and we headed into the terminal. It was a nice place to wait, it seemed much bigger than the Port Canaveral one and it was bustling with super excited people. Keep in mind, most of the people on this cruise book on Feb. 1, 2007. That is a long wait for such a cool trip!
We got boarding number 18 and they were on #11, so we signed the kids up for the youth clubs and got our pager. We took pictures with Mickey and Goofy chatted with fellow cruisers. One our number was called, we got in line and went through security and took our boarding pictures and finally made it on the ship!!!! It was about 1:00.
We headed up to deck 9 and got some lunch and waited for the rooms to be opened. They said the rooms would be ready by 1:45, so we were doing just fine! The kids were thrilled to have their 2 favorite things, Pizza and Ice Cream. They also love to play Ping Pong
so they were already happy as can be. Mom, of course, cant be happy until all the bags are unpacked and everything settled in, so I wanted to start working on that. We went to our room at about 2:00 and had some lovely surprises! We had a beautiful fruit and cheese platter from my In-laws and a Bon Voyage souvenir box and Excursion kit from our
Travel Agent. How awesome! We also had a surprise for Emily
Grandma and Grandpa gave her a $30 ship credit for her birthday! How awesome!!!
At 3:30 we started the safety drill and donned our lovely orange vests. We are in station O and the drill went very quickly and smooth. Everyone was there too! A miracle!!!!
After the drill, we headed up to deck for the sail away party. It was really hot and sunny, but it was a nice party. The girls love to dance and play and we all got red streamers to wave around. It was nice. We then went back to the room to watch us maneuver down the channel out to the ocean. The port here isnt very pretty as it is really a shipping port. But it was neat seeing all the big cranes etc. There are several restaurants down the canal and it was really fun having all the people sitting outside waving and yelling to us. It was a perfect sail off! I love it when the horn goes
so do the people watching!
I read through all the info in our room about how to order our pins and other important information. Then our bags started arriving. I kicked everyone out of the room so I could start unpacking, but pretty soon it was time for the Welcome Aboard show. I am glad we went as it was a nice show and parts of it were really funny! We found out that there are over 2000 repeat guests on this cruise. An all time record! That is amazing!!!!
We were then off to dinner
we have APL rotation, so dinner is 8:15 at Animators tonight. We didnt have all our stuff unpacked for dinner yet but we tried our best to be dressed correctly. I had requested our favorite server (Andrew from the Philippines) and I was anxious to see if he would be there. We were seated and met our server and it was Toto, not Andrew. That was a little bit of a bummer, but we knew pretty quickly that Toto was going to take great care of us. The beverage server was also awesome, so we are totally fine with our new servers! Whew
can you imagine having bad servers for 15 nights? Oh, the dinner tonight was the Welcome Aboard menu.
We had a nice meal and I headed back to the room with Jessica and Emily. We really tried to encourage the kids to go to the teen club, and they did for a little, but then came back and said they were tired. So, we called it a day. What an exciting day!
PS, the ship seems to be moving fairly slow and the seas are calm and the weather has been perfect so far!