The wife myself and two kids aged nine and 11 looking for something fun to do on the kids spring break. I had already booked a trip to savanna and I made plans to do some sightseeing there. Because of recent headlines I figured there may be decent prices on a cruise. I checked and sure enough the price of a five day cruise was almost the same as my three-day trip in Savannah. So I canceled the Savannah trip and booked the cruise out of Jacksonville on the Carnival fascination. I booked 2 cabins side-by-side both with portable views. This was my second cruise so I made sure to take care of parking before I left. I used a local cruise Parking facility and not the Jacksonport terminal facility it was much cheaper and they had a great benefit which I will review in the tips below after the review. We live in South Carolina and being it was Easter weekend we left a day early and got a hotel in Jacksonville to avoid traffic. This turned out to be a great idea since a 4 hour trip took 6 1/2 hours.

embarkation

We punched the address to the parking in our GPS in the morning and we were on our way. We arrived about 10 Parked our car And proceeded to the waiting room. It was Spacious and had some comfy couches and TV with cartoons for the kids. We realized our sunblock was only about half full so we purchased some little gift area in the parking lot lobby. These guys could pretty much charge whatever they want but I found everything to be priced very well. You could get a bottle of wine for six dollars if you forgot your wine and sunblock was like seven dollars. The shuttle came by to pick us up at 10:30. We were given tickets with numbers and were loaded in the order of our numbers so we made it to the first shuttle. The shuttle service loaded and unloaded our bags and we didn't have to deal with them again until we arrived at our staterooms later in the day. We had maybe 10 people ahead of us and security we went through waited maybe another five minutes until we spoke to the registration desk. It went very quickly since we preregistered online including all our passport information. We were giving of boarding group number and are directed to some chairs prepare for boarding. We were boarding group for they started calling boarding group one right at 11 AM and called us by at about 1115. We shuffled through with our group to be obligatory boarding picture. We were on our ship and on the Lido deck by 1125. The onboard embarkation process was a lot more smooth than I expected and being as I don't like crowds that much that was a huge relief. Read more