My wife and I decided to take a long holiday cruise vacation this year since our adult children were going to be staying with their partner’s families. While we usually prefer NCL’s style of cruising and passenger makeup we were also looking at other line’s offerings due to what we perceived as a recent diminishing of value in NCL. We were interested in a longer 12 to 20 day relaxing itinerary and after a bit of looking decided this recently added 14 day Panama Canal cruise from Miami to Los Angeles was being offered at an exceptional value. Inside guarantees were $899pp, and actually dropped to $649pp at about 30 days out. I felt part of this value and lackluster bookings may have been due to what I considered some poor ports on the itinerary or that the cruise was just at the very beginning of the better season for canal cruises, but after a few price drops the ship filled quickly and sold out.

We live in the central East Coast, USA and found very reasonable flights to and from Delta’s hub in Atlanta, GA. We actually flew into Fort Lauderdale airport one day early and rode Uber to the Hilton Garden Inn at Miami South Beach. The fare was $28 and the hotel was about the same cost as those near the FLL airport. The hotel did have an extra fee restaurant, but many better dining options were within reasonable walking or a short $3 ride away. Lincoln Road Mall offered a wide variety of things to do. In addition to providing a safety cushion for flight travel plans, the extra day in Miami provided a nice beach stop and gave us a chance to visit the city, as we were last there in the mid 1990’s.

As there were no scheduled arrival times for this cruise we arrived at the port about 9:45, a little earlier than normal, but I was afraid getting a ride to the port might become more difficult as the morning progressed. There were five ships embarking at the port of Miami that morning. I felt better about it when first on board around 11:45, I looked out to see both the MacArthur Causeway and Venetian Way between Miami Beach and access to the port in a terrible traffic jam. We were among the first 200 people lining up for the security check to open, which began around 10:00. There were two unusual incidents at embarkation. One was unfortunate as a young boy got his arm caught in the rollers of one of the x-ray machines (I met his parents later in the cruise – after a day in the Miami hospital they were all able to catch the ship in Cartagena and the boy was expected to fully recover). This incident caused a lengthy complete shutdown of all the security lines and created a very long line outside the terminal building. This is port security, mainly looking for contraband, and not like a security breach at an airport so it seemed a little of an overreaction to me, but everyone found it hard to complain when a child was injured. This may have been a factor in our late sail away, but was probably also because the ship had a lot of provisioning to do as it had just come from a two week cruise going right into another. Read more