Quick background: My husband is 30 and I am 29 years old. We have cruised two other times both on the Sovereign of the Seas. We will be doing two family cruises next year. We love cruises but we love to just travel in general.

Day Before: Our flight arrived in Fort Lauderdale about 7:30pm. We stayed at the Hampton Inn Fort Lauderdale Airport North the night before. This was a nice hotel with a nice room. I have read that lot of people say to stay on 17th Street if you want to do a lot. However, my husband and I were just looking for a nice place to stay with a free shuttle from the airport and to the pier. This fit perfectly. There is a McDonald's right in a front of it and few other quick eating options around. The only issue we had was that the shuttle to the pier seemed to be overbooked (which I had read about prior to going). They gave us a time slot the night before of 12 noon. However, there was an 11:30am group still waiting to go at 12:30pm. We were able squeeze in at 12:30 and were at the pier in no time. So it was not a major problem.

Day 1: Embark It took about fifteen minutes from the time we got out of the shuttle to the time we were in our room. There were not any long lines for check-in. We did online check-in so we had our Set Sail Pass ready. Because there were no people in the Diamond line, they told us to check in there. It went quickly and we were in our room by 1:00pm. We then went to eat lunch in the Windjammer. Read more