adventures in cruising - day one

Well, we're back from our fabulous, amazing, wonderful vacation. I'm sad it's over. So sad that I didn't even start to unpack until today. I couldn't even find some of my hair products when I was getting ready for church Sunday. But I don't care! I'm too busy catching up on my TV shows and putting all my pictures on Snapfish and admiring them! And doing laundry! I'm going to try and blog every day this week, because there are too many funny stories from the cruise to fit in one post! So today, I'll start with our VERY STRESSFUL first day.

Our fab friends, Jason and Alicia, who lived near us in NY but now live in CA, accompanied us on our vacation. They had been in Savannah, GA where Jason was speaking at SCAD. Our ship was to sail on Saturday at 4:00, meaning we had to be on the boat before 3:00. J&A took the train from Savannah to Orlando on Saturday morning. We woke up at like 8:30 - we were all packed and I wanted to empty the dishwasher and finish one last load of laundry before we left. As we were having breakfast, the phone rang - it was Jason saying the train had left an hour late. It was now getting into the station at 1:30, and it's an hour drive to Port Canaveral, so we were going to get there around 2:30, which was cutting it close.

As the morning progressed, we got more and more calls from Jason saying the train was later and later - by this time we were calling Carnival AND Amtrack, seeing what was up with the train, seeing what was the ABSOLUTE latest time we could get to the dock. We waited at the train station for over an hour. I kept going in and talking to the little guy who was making the announcements; the train kept making unexpected stops! Finally they arrived, running off of the train and into the car. I was pulling out of the parking lot practically before they got their luggage in!

We were SO LUCKY that there was no traffic on the Beachline, and I sped down the highway toward the ship while we caught up with Jason and Alicia. I finally got ahold of the main desk at the Carnival Glory counter, and she told us we would be okay, they would still be there to let us on the ship. We arrived at the dock around 3:30-ish and found that they were still waiting on a bus of cruisers, so we were able to slow down a little.

The first thing we did was EAT! We were starved! We had PIZZA and it was YUMMY! Then we explored the ship a little bit and eventually headed down to find our rooms. While we were sitting around talking in the lobby, Brian kept taking pictures of Alicia and I and laughing. We couldn't figure it out! Then he showed us the pictures - there was this sad-looking man behind us! Brian thought he was so funny, he was really taking pictures of that man! And thus began the week of us making the "sad man" pose and laughing hysterically.


Then we went to dinner and found our table - we had a table for 4 and we were very happy about that! We also had a fab waitress named Martina. That night, we

went to the "welcome aboard" show - it wasn't so great - and then wandered around the ship and talked and talked and talked and stayed up late! We had adjoining cabins and it was awesome.

Stay tuned for day two...