We furnished our own travel to the Port of Embarkation. We had no trouble with this. The Embarkation was long and slow. Thank god, we did not have children. First they lost our luggage and the pursers also.
We were originally scheduled to go to St. Maarten. It was changed to St. Thomas where we had been many times. Our next stop was Funchal...not a very interesting place to be as there many other ports in Portugal that are interesting with lots of history. Next, we stopped at Malaga, Spain. They do make good wine but we can find good wine most anywhere in the world. Boring??? After Spain, the seas were very rough and we expected the ship to have stabilizers, which the ship did not. It took me back to my old Liberty ship days at the end of World WarII in the Japanese hurricane.
During this time, we found the meals were awful. Not edible. I requested to see the Maitre d', and after four days he finally came to our table. I explained to him that the food was not edible in any way shape of form He explained to me there were 61 nationalities running the ship. I said, they needed to change the menu (even if it were me) to show the stewards department how to cook. These 61 nationalities do not know how to cook. I even requested the head chef to come to our table so that I could find out how he was destroying the food. He did not speak English, the maitre d' dismissed him and the menus could not be changed as they were set out days in advance. The food continued to come with sauces of varying kinds that ruined a perfectly good cut of meat. It was a big joke when they had on the menu twice baked potatoes. The were skinned, warmed, cut in two with some kind of nasty sauce and warmed again. You couldn't even cut it into small pieces. Because of all this nasty food, I developed diarrhea on the second day and continued until disembarking the ship in Italy.