We are confirmed cruisers, this being our 7th trip on a ship. It is our second cruise on a ship with the NCL name, We have also sailed with Princess 3 times, and Uniworld's river cruises once.
Feeling like we know our way around now, we booked our own air. That's less expensive than NCL booking - but since NCL will not wait for independent flyers with delayed arrivals we flew in a day early and stayed at a Best Western that had a shuttle to the ship. Embarking was no fun. There were two NCL ships side by side and between them perhaps 4000+ passengers were boarding at the same time.Out on the dock this was exciting and gave us the feeling of the old transatlantic sailings which were a big deal.
Getting onto the ship was less exciting. The Jade had her own building to enter, and there was a mob at the doors. After a few minutes we were off the front stairs and into the building itself where we found the mob getting organized into a kind of line. To our left we could see the high-ticket passengers breezing through what was an hour or more of standing around for us. That was really annoying. The big thing about cruising originally is that it was one-class travel. Now, increasingly, it is two-class travel with most of us plebeians in the lower class.