Embarkation day to East Caribbean!

 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 traffic. I swear it took us over an hour to get to the terminal instead of 20 minutes. But FINALLY, we got to the luggage drop off, and then we found the end of the queue for boarding.

And the crush of people would have been overwhelming, but we weren't stationary; the line moved, not super fast, but we weren't really ever standing still. We got through security, then on to the medallion desk. The couple next to us getting their medallions were told they were at the wrong terminal--they should be at terminal 24. My stomach sunk for them. How were they going to get there? And would they get there in time? I hope they made it to their ship in time.

Finally we were on the ship! On our first cruise, we immediately found a place to sit and tried mostly unsuccessfully to order food to be brought to us. And we just sat there until we could go to our room. This time, this cruise, we knew we could go wherever we wanted. We actually went up to our room, left our carry-ons in the room and went out to find food and get used to the ship layout. It's quite a bit different than the two other Princess ships I've been on, much bigger.

Here we are on the walk way onto the ship

our lovely stateroom! I like that we have a sofa in addition to a bed

View from the doorway. Bathroom is on the right, clothing storage on the left. Balcony straight ahead.

Our view from the balcony. Thank goodness we would have other views once we left the dock.

Selfie on the bed.

The other side of the ship from our room. View is much nicer.

We are underway! Jim and I found lounge chairs on the port side on the Lido deck to watch sail-away and eat pizza

Pizza, chaise, a view. What could be nicer?

From out balcony, we watched the sun set. An angry eye and some jagged teeth!

I took so many pictures over the space of 5 minutes or so.

The colors!

I could use this palette for quilt colors someday.

Because of Katie's, Hayley's, and my success at the Beatles pub trivia on our Alaska cruise, we made sure to attend the Beatles Music Trivia this first evening on the ship. The screen though--oof, that's some bad AI. George's guitar is bent, Ringo has a guitar, 3 are in white and one in black (they never would have done that in real life!). Paul doesn't have a guitar. And the faces in back if you look closely, are HIDEOUS.

Even this scree is bad because the one we think is Ringo has a guitar and six fingers.

Also, there was a menorah off to the side. The room where we played trivia was used just prior by a Hanukkah dinner for Jewish passengers. 

So that Beatles Trivia game recap: It was all audio clips from the songs--a snippet of lyrics--and the task was to identify the title of the song. Jim was aces at this. He got them all right with no hesitation. The songs they used were all super popular ones, hardly any deep cuts. Jim and one other guy got them all right so the host did a tie-breaker question: How long is the song Hey Jude? Jim guessed 7 minutes 33 seconds and the other guy guess 6 minutes 51 seconds. The answer: 7 minutes 11 seconds. The other guy was one second closer to the right answer. He won, but when we went over to congratulate him, he shared the prize, mainly because he got two decks of cards and two bottle stoppers and didn't need that many. The host even got Jim an extra drawstring bag, so he did get a prize. Also Jim looked up the song length issue online and discovered there is some discussion--some experts suggest the song is actually 7 minutes 12 seconds. If so, Jim would have won. It was all for fun so it really doesn't matter, but Jim is a Beatles knowledge king in my opinion.

Jim is assessing his Beatles song trivia winnings.

Off to dinner at the Soleil dining room. This was our assigned dinner table for the remainder of the trip

My meat and polenta was very yummy

I have no pictures from the later evening when we met up with Pam and Tim (long time friends of ours who had booked the same cruise) to chat and play tabletop games. They taught us how to play Skyjo and I enjoyed it. It will have to join our games library!