My husband and I thoroughly enjoy cruising and vacationing. We are a young couple and recently traveled on the Jewel of the Seas Ultimate Panama Canal Cruise for our Honeymoon from November 9-20, 2009. We have been on a few Royal Caribbean ships in the past, so we knew what to expect for the most part. We had never been on a cruise of this length before, so we were apprehensive about going on such a long cruise. In the end, we decided that we could have stayed on the boat another two weeks and been perfectly happy!
My mother dropped us off at the Port of Miami (we live an hour or so away), this was quick and easy because we didn't have to find parking or walk very far. We left our bags with the porter and I was anticipating a long wait to go through security, to our surprise we walked right into the security checkpoint and were finished in a matter of 10 minutes. The wait came while in the massive lines to check in. It seemed many of the computers were having issues and lines kept closing. After being shifted to a few different lines we had our SeaPass cards after about an hour.
Things were a little different this time as they synched our SeaPass card to our pictures on board the ship rather than in the terminal. I found this a little disappointing because we had to board the ship and then again wait in a long line, but this time it was outside, in the heat.