Please don't mind the intro, it has a bearing on my experience with the people I have met during my cruise ..... In June of 08, my wife bought me a surprise gift for my 40th birthday. It was for the 8 day Carnival Miracle cruise on 09/14/2008. I was floored. As soon as we got home from dinner, I immediately ran to the computer and started investigating this whole "cruise thing". That's when I found the terrific resource which I now know and love as CruiseCritic.com. As a first time cruiser, I was on here several times a day for months gathering info and communicating with many of you who have been the most helpful people that I have found on any forum on the internet.

Embarking...

My wife and I live in upstate NY and drove to the pier, which is a 50 minute drive. We got to the pier and dropped off our bags with the porters and proceeded to the parking area...$240 for the week....OUCH (we knew ahead of time of the cost). While parking the car, we observed the Miracle in all her glory, she looked majestic! Nice and clean. We worked our way down the escalators to the line to board, proceeded to wait in one of 3 monstrous lines for a little over an hour. For the longest time we just stood in 1 spot, which was brutal. The three lines were broke down into a lane on the right (which we were in), a lane on the left and one in the center of the pier, which was the only line which had seats. I would say to get to the pier a little earlier to grab those seats, but I don't think that I would want to get their an hour earlier just for the luxury. While waiting on line my wife and I were your average up-tight New Yorkers, barely cracking a smile with anyone around us....Then something uncanny happened. There was a couple in line directly in front of us. The man was wearing a Washington Redskins jersey. My wife (clueless to football) asked him "Are you guys from Ohio" thinking the indian represented the Cleveland Indians...they got quite a laugh from that, and after a couple minutes of conversing with them, I discovered that the woman was in fact lollyRN from the boards on CruiseCritic.com, with whom I had been conversing with last several months.....unbelievable. In a crowd of 2,000+ and talking with someone online for months whom I knew nothing about on a website with over 300,000 and to have her standing directly in front of us in line was insane. Needless to say, the four of us immediately hit it off, and they were our buds the rest of the trip (we even got the Maitre D to seat us for dinner every night). Read more