Day one:

Embarkation:

Tell me again why we decided to go on a cruise with a 2 year old? Well it was the best solution we could think of to see most of New Zealand in a relatively short time frame. So Embarkation was literally just down the hill from our Hotel-Holiday Inn Old Sydney which I highly recommend. As expected it was sort of chaotic but we got there around 11:30 am which was the time that the ship opened for allowing Customers to get on. (keep in mind that the ship just arrived earlier that morning to let off another cruise…..no rest for the ship company!). There were lines for general boarding and priority boarding but since we got there so early it didn’t matter. We had many pieces of luggage and with our 2 year old didn’t know how to get our luggage from the curb to checkin but my wife found an attendant who took our luggage and checked it in which was a relief! We went inside and this is where it was really chaotic with lots of people filling out forms for customs and going through security. It was how I had expected it. One recommendation to make to RC is to have you fill out the custom cards with our sail and pass cards online so that way when we arrive it is a simple check in through security. I think this would ease the craziness of trying to finish this or at least give us the forms ahead of time so that we can at least fill out and when we arrive go right to customs. After we got through security it took us about 45 minutes from start to finish, not bad at all. Once we got inside the ship our rooms were not ready until 13:00 and we had about an hour so we headed up to the Windjammer (more review on this place later). We had lunch and than checked into our room. Room on check in was ok. It was sort of clean but noticed dirt underneath furniture as we moved things around for our daughter. They had the Pack n’ Play set up which was nice. The Suite was nice though for the room. Could not beat the size of the bathroom from our earlier cruises. Our luggage came in separate loads but we did receive them in about 4 hours which again was nice. Read more