Autumn Cruise Vacation Part 2: CRUISE DAY 1

We left early Monday morning (Oct. 12th) stopping to fill up gas and grab some Starbucks carmel apple spice and hot chocolate. We drove to San Diego and followed the GPS Dustin’s parents let us borrow, but was kinda weird. We parked at a Park and Ride and were shuttled to our big boat. We didn’t have any tags on our luggage and for some reason did not know where to get them, so we brought all our suitcases and everything into the check in because that’s where we thought we needed to go… after going through security and all that, we found out that you were supposed to drop them off before even entering the building, so we were stuck with EVERYTHING and couldn’t put them into our rooms for another hour… oops. Made it a little crazier for when we got on the boat and EVERYONE was there getting some lunch. Dustin stayed with the luggage while I grabbed some food, then I stayed with the luggage while he some food. I felt a little retarded, but whatever. It was kinda fun playing “spot the Mormons” while watching everyone run around the Lido deck to get lunch. Ha ha ha. I guess we’re pretty easy to spot.

Finally 1:30 rolled around and we were able to put our luggage in our room and unpack in our little home for the next 4 days. I thought our cabin was pretty spacious actually… much bigger than my first cruise. We were at the front of the boat and had 2 port hole windows that were pretty cool. After unpacking and relaxing, we wanted to explore a little, so we did. We found that our ship had a water slide (which Dustin really liked) and a mini golf course which was pretty cool. Before long we had our little lifeboat drill so we grabbed our life jackets and headed to the Mikado Lounge (their big theater) because that was our muster station. I thought it was weird that we met inside instead of outside…. But when everyone was ready, we got to go outside to the lifeboats… which were on deck 8 and are a LONG way down to the ocean…. Not quite sure how they lower them full of people, but it really was a long way down!
After putting of life jackets away, we went to the Lido deck to say goodbye to San Diego as we left the port and headed out to the open sea. Our dinner was the late seating, which I wasn’t happy about at first, but then we realized we could eat TWO dinners, one early in the buffets, and then the nice seated dinner. Ha ha ha. Constantly eating on the cruise… best part ever. Hahaha. It turned out that the later dinner was a good thing anyway because we got to make friends with a nice young married couple from Riverside, CA named Ryan and Nicole, only 21 and already married for a year…. Not your typical out of Utah scenario. :)
The first day for dinner we ate a LOT. I was SO FULL….so full that after dinner, pretty sure we went to our cabin and laid there dead. I couldn’t move. Dustin couldn’t move. So that ended our day 1.