After a few days in Florida visiting Mom and Dad, our cruise vacation began with an early morning flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
We left West Palm Beach at 7:30am and were on the ground in San Juan just after 9:30am. There have been some improvements to the airport since we were there a couple of years ago as a whole new section has been added.
After picking up our luggage, we made our way to the taxi stand outside to catch a cab down to the pier in Old San Juan where the Carnival Valor was docked. We felt the change in temperature as soon as the doors opened. Florida was only in the 60’s and low 70’s and it was already above 80F at that time of the morning in Puerto Rico. We arrived quite early to the pier so we waited about 45 minutes to get let into the terminal. We checked in and waited another hour and a half to get on board the ship. I can’t say Carnival’s embarkation process was the best we have ever experienced. We have sailed with Carnival several times and have never seen things so disorganized and chaotic. They assigned everyone a zone number and the theory is that you board by group but, with no announcement or any warning, a whole bunch of people who had checked in well after we did, started heading toward security. We were well back in the line and waited another half hour to get through security and get on the ship. We have never had that happen on any of our prior cruises, so it was a negative for Carnival on that score.
We got on the ship around 12:45pm and the cabins were already open to be accessed so we dropped our carry-ons and headed to Rosie’s Restaurant for the lunch buffet. After lunch, we toured around the ship getting a sense of where things were and taking pictures as we went. The layout is pretty similar to the Carnival Victory, which we have been on a couple of times before.
We had full intentions of getting off the ship and walking around Old San Juan for the afternoon but made the mistake of laying down….and that was all she wrote! Turns out that it was probably good that we didn’t get off the ship because we heard from our supper tablemates that the security line was really long and delayed getting back on. They waited quite a long time in line even though they had already checked in earlier in the afternoon.
Supper was earlier than normal at 5:30pm and was open sitting. We ended up at a table for six with a couple from Ontario (the ship was crawling with Canadians) and a couple from Sao Paulo, Brazil. We had such a good time that we were all still sitting around the table at 8pm. We love meeting people from near and far and getting to know a little about where they’re from.
After supper, we changed and hit the hot tub until the mandatory Muster Drill was called at 9:30pm. Miss the Muster Drill at your own peril!! They don’t mess around after the Costa Concordia sinking and they will hunt you down to make sure you go through the drill. We were laughing that we were getting soooo old because we were toast by that time and we had the first of many early nights on our cruise.
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