Any issues embarkation or debarkation that others traveling from the port might need to be aware of?
Where to begin............
I guess to start, you can take note of these posted signs:
General arrival and parking -We arrived by cab around 9am.
There was a bag drop off right at the entrance.
The porters were waiting there to collect our tagged luggage.
The terminal was open, but que lines for security remained closed until 10:30am.
The layout is very different and entails a lot more walking at this Port. First you pass thru security (white desks) and bag screening/metal detectors behind them
you will then walk practically half the length of the terminal
to here
where a mini breakfast stand was open.
Keep walking to the check-in area.
then you get to walk more than halfway back to board the ship.
If you plan to drive and park at the port you need to figure out a few things in advance:
1. which Pier the Magic is docked at when you arrive and
2. whether the Magic will be docking at the same Pier when you return.
this is important as there are open parking lots on Level 3 for each pier and in our case, the ship used 2 different locations.
When we arrived on Wed. the Magic was docked at Pier 88.
This has the most improved port facilities and is the designated pier for NCL.
The parking entrance was manned with attendants but remained coned off until 9:45. They appeared to be letting vehicles thru though.
this was a very full parking lot on a Wed morning. I counted roughly 50 open spaces with no prospects of anything freeing up for our cruise, since the Magic was arriving from a WBTA and there were no other ships in port that day.
It looked like once the lot was full, they were allowing cars to park between the two piers on Level 3
You can see them all lined up, parked on both sides in this shot.
When we returned on Sun., the Norwegian Breakaway was using Pier 88.
and the Magic docked at Pier 90.
Which means, if you had parked your vehicle at this pier (88) when you first arrived:
You now had to walk - trucking your bags - all the way back over to that pier from here (90).
Hopefully, this was an isolated issue unique only to our sail and they will be using the same Terminal for the remaining NYC cruises.
