My husband and I drove to Long Beach the day before our September 1 cruise on the Paradise and stayed at the Coast Long Beach Hotel (our third time there) using their convenient Park and Sail package. We arrived a bit early, but were able to check in, had a very nice convenient room on the ground floor which was very convenient to the bar/restaurant and had a partial view of the L.A. river and across to Long Beach from our patio outside.

The next morning, we took the 10:00 a.m. shuttle over to the port (the regular driver was late so one of the front desk employees kindly drove us over). We dropped our 2 suitcases with the porters and walked to the Queen Mary for early check in. We were the only ones in the Carnival area at first so check in was done in 3 minutes and we were back out the door over to the embarkation area in front of the dome with our Zone 1 ticket. We walked around a bit and then sat on the benches in the Zone 1 area (there were more benches around than we remembered from last time) and were the 2nd group waiting in the Zone 1 line. They had closed up the early check in on the Queen Mary about 10:45 and the employees there walked over to the dome. About 11:00, they said we could get inside the building, but would wait in there for a few minutes before boarding the ship. Just before 11:00, they ushered us in after just a handful of VIPs and handicapped folks (didn't look like any wedding parties that day). We walked right through security, no lines, then sat on the benches to the left for about 10 minutes. We then all lined up for the embarkation photos, up the escalator, and on to the ship. We have a personal contest to see how early we can get our first DOD, this time we beat our record by 3 minutes and had our first DOD by 11:39 and were sitting out on the aft Lido eating area enjoying the view and calling our friends just to make them jealous!

This seemed to be sort of a 'slow' week in that the ship was not quite completely full and there seemed to be very few kids though we never did hear the statistics. The crowd was all ages, not too many of any age group, so it was a good mix. We were in cabin E75 for the second time on the Paradise (some of our friends thought that was weird to do). It's a great location, very convenient to everything and since this was our 4th time on a Fantasy class ship, we know our way around very well. Read more