We live out on Long Island, NY and decided to take a short cruise to wrap up the summer. We've been on 6 cruises: 5 Disney and one Carnival out of Tampa- and all have been in mid-to-late August.

We've never done a touristy-Manhattan thing, so we decided to book a room on priceline. Took the LIRR west on Friday afternoon. The room at the Best Western was (thisbig). Very tiny. Dropped the luggage and went out to midtown and Times Square. Throughout the day we were getting E-mails from Carnival updating us about Hurricane Irene and how it would affect our travel plans (please cancel, please cancel, please cancel) The decided to begin boarding earlier so we could leave by 3pm.

We hopped in a cab right outside the hotel and got dropped off at the end of the gigantic line at the terminal. It eventually started to move. Checking in was very segmented. Deck 6 goes on this line, etc. Got the key cards pretty quickly. But then there was the impossible task of trying to get everyone to board the ship. They decided to do it by zones, and we were zone 32. Apparently, no one communicates in the terminal bc one employee told us to go on this line, but then the employee at the begining of the line told us we should have sat down and waited. Read more