Day 1 Embarkation
We live in the Tampa Bay area so we drove to the port -- we pulled up to Cruise Terminal #2 around 11am -- a porter came right up and made sure we had enough tags -- we had silver tags because our cabin was "To Be Announced" but I had already looked online at Carnival's website and found that we were assigned to cabin M57 (I used the "secret method" -- just go to Carnival's website (no matter who you booked through) go to your funpass area and click on gifts -- then click on the details of any gift and you should see your booking# + assigned cabin# - I was able to see our cabin # over a month before the cruise date.)
So the porter gave us new red tags and quickly had me write just our last name and cabin # (we already had regular luggage tags with our cell phone#). The porter took our bags away (tipped him $8 for 5 bags, 2 bags were full of SCUBA gear) and we hopped back into the car to park in the long term parking garage -- I am not sure if we went the correct way -- we ended up taking a left and then 3 right hand turns all around the parking garage but finally ended up in the garage -- they made us pay $60 up front ($12 a day) and they accepted credit cards. They told us to park on level 3. We were able to park really close to the elevator (this came in handy the day we returned!)