After many weeks of planning a weekend get away I could hardly wait to get to Miami airport and meet up with my traveling buddy and partner in crime for the weekend. The plan was for am and my friend to meet at the airport and take a taxi cab to the pier to get on the boat. We chose to pay the $27.00 cab fare (advertised at $24.00)and forgo the cruise line transportation to the pier. We were both so excited anxiously talking about what we thought that the crusing experience would be like for us. As I said before neither myself or my long time friend had ever cruised before and this was the first time that we had left the children home with the husbands to have a true girls only weekend. We were EXCITED!

Excitement quickly turned to surprise after stepping foot out of the taxi and onto the boat. Although the check in process went very quickly (even though we seemed to arrive at a very popular time)the gentleman that checked us in was not knowledgeable at all. For every question we asked he seemed to not know the answer and made no attempt to find out either. We were still excited and so we just laughed it off as an employee that needed to brush up on his job knowledge. After continuing onto the boat we had expected someone (ANYONE) to have notified us about where to go or what there was to do - really any info would have been helpful at this point. That never happened so we were left to our own devices. We found an employee that was rushing about to question the location and arrivl of our luggage. We were told bags would be in the rooms by 5:00 pm.

We decided to sightsee around the ship and made our way to the top deck pool side. We were both surprised about the small size of the pools but did not plan on doing much onboard swimming so not a biggie to either of us. We found a bartender to serve up a mixed beverage to toast to our vacation. At this point I could go on and on about the price ($10.00 for a pina coloda)but what is the point because it seems that way on every cruise line or so I am told. The drink was not spared the alcohol for which I am sure is a plus to many but I am not a big drinker. Read more