We took this cruise as a girls' trip with a group of 8. We booked through Groupon. We purchased the voucher for the cruise through Groupon, but then you have to call the cruise line to redeem the voucher and give them all your information to book the sailing. When we called the cruise line we were able to give the cabin numbers of other people in our group, so we could request rooms close together.

We're from Tampa, but decided to drive over the night before so we wouldn't have to get up so early. We stayed at the Hawthorne Suites which was pretty nice and only about 6-7 miles from the port. The night before, we went out to eat/drink at CityPlace which is a big outdoor mall/restaurant/bar area. We had a lot of fun there hopping from bar to bar and exploring. We ate at Copper Blues and the food was really good and fun atmosphere. The area was only about a $7 Uber ride from the hotel.

The next morning we arrived at the port around 11:40. We used the valet to park our car, paid up front $18/day. Valet was fairly quick and the valet attendants were friendly. We got our bags tagged with our room numbers and headed into security. No one took our bags at the curb, you have to bring your luggage up to security and put it up onto the conveyor so they can x-ray everything. I had a large bottle of water and a couple of cans of soda in my bag. They scanned it and made me open my bag and I thought they were going to confiscate my drinks, but they just made me show them my water bottle so they could make sure it wasn't booze and gave it back to me. I saw a shelf in the corner that already had a bunch of confiscated beer/wine/liquor, so if you're trying to sneak alcohol, you better be sneaky about it! This cruise doesn't allow any outside liquor, not even a bottle of wine per person. It took us about an hour to get through all the lines and get on board. Read more