I drove out from Las Vegas on Friday night after work - I had Pricelined a hotel in San Diego - and I was able to get the Sheraton Harbor Island for $70 a night (not bad considering that it was going for $140 on the Sheraton website). The Sheraton Harbor is what one normally gets when you use Priceline for Downtown San Diego - I'm not sure if they recently renovated and moved up to the 4* downtown - or Priceline rearranged what they consider downtown - but in the older days the least expensive hotel downtown was the Hilton. But I have to say that the Sheraton was a really nice hotel - free wireless in the lobby, a nice sized pool, unbelievable views of the marina on one side and city on the other, but most important a great staff that actually knew my name before checkout on Monday (example - I called valet on Sunday because I was going to Point Loma for dinner - they picked up and said "Hello Geoff, we will have your car up front in 5 minutes" - that's what I call service. I will stress - you will have to drive if you stay here (or do what I did - walk into town and then take the Trolley to the Little Italy stop - you only have about a mile and a half walk back to the hotel from there) After all San Diego a walking town.

I doubt anyone on Cruise Critic cares about what I did in San Diego - so I'll leave that for a Trip Advisor review. Let's jump ahead to Monday morning and the drive to the port.

At this point I've already done the - get up - run to the other side of the hotel - and checked out the ship in the distance - it isn't one of the biggest ships I've been on - but hey - it still looks really big - even at 3 miles away. Read more