This was our first cruise with Celebrity. Being great fans of Royal Caribbean (RCI), we were a little concerned about taking such a long first cruise with a new line, but from all we had heard, we expected as good a cruise - if not better - than we had experienced on Brilliance of the Seas (our favorite ship) or Adventure of the Seas.
We followed our standard practice of flying into the departure city a day early. We flew from Philadelphia to San Diego with a connection in Salt Lake City on Delta. Delta no longer serves anything free other than non-alcoholic beverages and small bags of pretzels, regardless of the time of day. We ate breakfast at 3:30 a.m. but were starving during the first leg of the flight, so we purchased a bagel onboard, which tided us over until we landed in San Diego and had lunch. The flights were stress free and our luggage made it to California with us (unlike on the return, when we made the connection in Atlanta but our luggage did not). We rented a car from Hertz because we got a rate of $17.99/day for a compact car. Since we are not Gold Club members, I waited in line for about 25 minutes. At that time, we upgraded to a larger car so we could fit most of our luggage in the trunk, raising the cost to $23.99/day.
Getting out of the airport and to our hotel (The Fairfield Inn, San Diego) was easy. We used Marriott points for a free stay, and although the rooms were clean, this was a motel, not a hotel as other Fairfield Inns are. After checking in, confirming the hotel offered free high-speed Internet access, and dragging all our luggage up to the third floor, we went for lunch. Upon returning and settling in, I attempted to log onto the web through the hotel's Internet provider only to find it wasn't working. The front desk informed us that we needed to call the ISP. After two calls lasting more than 45 minutes, we determined there was a problem with the wiring in the room, and we went to the front desk to pick up a key for another room. We found occupants in the first room we tried, and the clerk spent another 20 minutes trying to find a non-smoking room, but we finally settled in a smoking room with a connection that worked. Unfortunately, it was in another building, which necessitated gathering our luggage on a cart, wheeling it down the hall, trying to get the cart into the small elevator, wheeling it across the parking lot, over a speed bump, into another elevator and down another long hall. We finally settled in around 8 p.m. local time, having been up since 3 a.m. East Coast time.