Embarkation: We had booked flights with JetBlue that arrived at 10am on the day of sailing. However, two weeks before our flights JetBlue sent us an email alerting us the flight had been cancelled and they took the liberty of changing us to a later flight that arrived at 1:00pm. That wasn’t going to work, so I rescheduled us to a flight the day before and we booked a hotel near the airport. The hotel was noisy but the room was spacious and walking distance to a number of restaurants. My brother flew in from a different city on a different airline and was scheduled to come in at 10am the day of embarkation. However, we texted us right before we were on our way to meet him at the airport that his flight would be delayed 2 hours. That was a tense hour of waiting and calling Southwest every 10 minutes to see if the flight would be delayed further. Luckily it wasn’t and his flight ended up being delayed only an hour so he arrived around 11:30am. I had to call FlatRate for hire twice to reschedule the airport pickup and they were great about it. The luggage took a while so the driver had to wait 15 minutes for us and we gave him a big tip for his trouble. We ended up arriving at Pier 66 at 12:30pm and were on the boat by 1:30pm after waiting in the luggage check-in line for 30 minutes and then the check-in line for 30 minutes. By this time, we were starving and headed immediately to the buffet for lunch. After eating we went back to the room to unpack and had all but 2 of our bags by 4pm. We headed up to the sail away party at 4pm and danced our way out of Seattle as the sun came out. My sister and I had a sail away cocktail (Mai Tai in a plastic bowl) as other family members grabbed a snack at the BBQ. Great way to start the cruise!

Cabin: We chose two cabins on the 5th floor. I only learned after booking that the 5th floor is usually the worst floor because it is under the casino. However, we heard no noise from above ever- it could have been because we were on the outside, versus inside cabin. We were located near the forward elevators, which made it very convenient to reach the Casino (Floor 6), Stardust Theater (Floor 6), Gym (Floor 12) and Spinnaker Lounge (Floor 13) all located in the Forward part of the ship. Getting to Garden Café took a little more time, but once we realized we had to walk to the mid elevator to access it, it was a breeze.

We didn’t meet our neighbors until Saturday evening as we were heading to dinner. They said they had not heard a peep from our room all week, so either we were very quiet or we were out each night partying. Hee! I think a little of both was true since the nights we weren’t out late, we were asleep early. Read more