Tales of a Shoebox Princess

 We planned to get to the ship around 10:30 AM, even though we knew there would be a long line to get in. The thing about embarkation lines is they move fast because cruise companies know how to manage a large number of people in a small window of time.  But we had to get to the port first. We got an Uber. The guy did not talk at all, just basic information exchanges necessary to get us to where we wanted to go. It should have been a 20 minute drive, but there was insane congestion as we got closer to the port. We waited for many minutes to turn right onto the road leading to the port. Then traffic on that road moved so very slow. We could have walked faster. Finally we got to the frontage road in front of the terminals, but the driver started to turn right, while our terminal was on the left. Jim had to quickly tell the driver to go left instead. And then the driver started to go to terminal 4, but we needed to go farther to terminal 2. And then still there was much much traf...

Two years ago (January 2024) we went on our first cruise. We loved it so much that we booked another cruise for December 2025 on the Sun Princess, the big Princess ship that had just started booking cruises. We picked the East Caribbean because our previous cruise was West Caribbean. Then we began the agonizing year and a half wait. It was so exciting to get to single digits on the countdown on the Princess app. After that long wait, the time had finally come to go on our long-anticipated vacation. We decided to travel to Ft. Lauderdale on Friday December 12, two days before embarkation because what if something happens and we have to delay a day? So Friday night, we landed in Ft Lauderdale. Saturday morning, we woke up to being half a block from the beach! First look at the beach.  We rented 2 chaises and an umbrella for the day Happy beach loungers. Mid morning, I wanted to put on my bathing suit but I had only brought one along (only have one). I googled places to buy bathing su...