Our friends with Elite status like to have us travel with them so we worked out that this would be a nice one. It was. We had smooth embarkation, glass-like sea on the way down, a fun but slightly damp jaunt around Cabo San Lucas, and generally an awesome cruise for our third cruise overall.

We are from northern San Diego County, about 100 minutes from San Pedro without traffic. Our friends are from the Bay Area and flew to Orange County, having tired of the LAX area. This put them directly on our drive to the port, whereas LAX is significantly north of it.

From our joint experience of driving to the San Pedro port, we worked out that we would go as early as we reasonably could. In spite of the construction mess around the bridge in Long Beach, we arrived at the parking lot around 10:30. Since our friends are Elite and we had club class cabins, we went through with priority boarding and barely paused until we got to the promenade deck on the ship. We dropped stuff off in our cabins and went to lunch. Absolutely impossible to imagine getting on more easily. Read more