Who we are: A middle-aged couple. We are moderately active. We walk or jog several miles a week and lift free-weights so we are in average to not bad physical shape. Sure we carry an extra couple of pounds  who doesnt in their 50s. This is our third cruise and the first with Royal Caribbean.

Flying the friendly skies: Saturday March 18th we flew Spirit Airlines from Washington National to Fort Lauderdale. Our flight arrived late in Fort Lauderdale due to Spirits manual process of counting passenger multiple times before take-off. Spirit did not use a bar-code reader when the passengers were loading on the plane so our full flight was delayed 30 minutes while they re-counted each passenger several times.

PreCruise Stay: We stayed one night pre-cruise at a Holiday Inn Express 17th Street. Upon arrival at the airport we picked up our luggage and used the bank of courtesy phones to call the Holiday Inn. The telephone is in the baggage pickup area and connects to the front desk of Holiday Inn Express. It took approximately 15 minutes for their shuttle to arrive. If you use their shuttle there is a designated pickup spot that is located off the main roadway on the terminal side that is not well marked and created a bit of confusion for us. Once at the hotel we signed up immediately for a shuttle service the following day to transport us to Port Everglades for $6 pp. There are several restaurants within walking distance so after check-in we got a late lunch than we walked off lunch by going several blocks up the bridge overlooking the ships in Port Everglades. Read more