Living in the California Central Valley, we decided to drive down the day before the cruise and stay at my brothers house about an hour from the port.
My wife, Julie, and I arrived at the port around 12:30pm. We took our luggage to the area where the porters were to drop them off. There seemed to be some confusion on the luggage tags. Printed within our document packet were luggage tags. It seems some people did not notice these and went to the porters with no deck tags on their luggage. There was someone there who had a table set up with the old style colored luggage tags. Since we had pulled ours from the document packet and attached them to our luggage, we handed off our luggage and proceeded to the check-in line.
The embarkation process went very smoothly. All total, from the time we got in line outside the terminal until we were talking onto the ship was just under an hour. The line inside moved quickly and with little confusion.