My husband, mother-in-law, three kids ages 6, 5, & 3 and I cruised on the Conquest July 30 - August 6.
Embarking: We live in the Dallas area, so we just drove to Galveston the day of the cruise. With 3 small children, we thought it would be easier to get up early and drive than to have one extra night in a hotel with all of us. We left Dallas at around 7:00 am. The drive to Galveston was really easy. We got there around 12:30 pm and this included two bathroom breaks. We were traveling with 2 other families that also had small kids.
One of the other husbands had the idea to drop all of the wives and children off at the terminal, then go park. This was a horrible idea! We could not get in line for the boarding process without our entire group. We ended up having to wait over an hour for the guys to get back . It was very hard to keep 7 kids under the age of 7 occupied in the cruise terminal. I think it would have been a lot less stressful to have all stayed together and parked. We thought we had reservation with EZ Parking online. EZ Parking did not have record of our reservation, which was not a big deal, it only cost $5 more. Once the men got to the terminal, it only took about 30-45 minutes to get on the ship, which was about 2:00 pm.