We flew into San Juan and spent the day prior to the cruise exploring Old San Juan on our own. Old San Juan is gorgeous and filled will all kinds of shopping, dining and historical buildings, and you could easily spend days there doing everything that OSJ has to offer. We stayed at the Hampton Inn near the airport, which was a little noisy due to runway noise from the neighboring airport, but did not disturb us at night due to decent soundproofing.

Saturday morning, embarkation day, we took an Uber to the port, and he dropped us off in front of a massive crowd of people. We started to walk inside and were quickly turned around and told to go to a certain colored column to drop our luggage. Unfortunately, the columns are colored near the bottom, and nearly impossible to see through the crowd, thus turning it into a free for all of people trying to get to the right line, but unable to see where the line goes from the end of the line. Once the luggage was loaded into the carts, we set out for security and check-in. Security, as usual, was questionable at best, and provided little in the way of assurance of actual security, and more of a security theater setting. After security, we were directed to check-in, and were placed in a line for Crown and Anchor guests, which moved no faster than the normal check-in line, and check in was provided by a very soft spoken employee, who did not seem terribly interested in her job. Maybe it was the heat? Security and check in were extremely hot, but it's the tropics, so what can you do? We were then directed up an escalator to the ship, where we were advised that our stateroom was ready.

We proceeded to our stateroom at the front of deck 9 (9504) where we were greeted with a typical stateroom, excluding the large porthole at the front. After some careful moving (pro tip: move the coffee table to the other side of the bed near the porthole for more room to move in the "living room" area) we began to unpack. My wife noticed that the hair dryer did not work, but there was a second one provided in the drawers below. These rooms do lack more than 2-3 outlets total, so don't plan on too many devices charging at once. The colors were, to quote my wife, "atrocious" and the stateroom was done up in a well worn green and peach motif, with yellow patterned curtains. The bed was comfortable, but pillows were lacking, and were very thin (we asked for extras) We spent most of the first day exploring the ship, and trying to get acquainted with the various areas on board. It was at this point we noticed that boarding had continued to fill an already crowded ship to absolute max capacity. When we went down for the muster drill, we filed into a crowded space at the front of the ship to hear the muster drill briefing, but had to listen to it once in English, then again in Spanish, followed by a number of chants, in Spanish, from the mainly Puerto Rican crowd. Read more