Western Carribbean Cruise

Up early Sunday morning and out to Dayton International Airport. It was a little cool, but, the weather was clear so we should have a good flight. We put our car in the Park-n-Go and they took us to the departure terminal. We walked up to the Air Tran counter--no one in line-- and checked our luggage. Took less than 2 minutes which was a lot faster than the last time. We went through security and again no one was in line so we cleared through security without any problems. Our departure was uneventful and we had favorable winds so we arrived at Tampa International Airport a little ahead of schedule. The first shuttle to our ship wasn't until 11:30 so we had a little wait.

We had a pleasant ride through downtown Tampa and our drive gave us an interesting briefing on Tampa and what we were seeing. We arrived at the terminal and again had very little wait to clear through customs and board the ship. We did have a slight delay because the computers crashed, but, they were brought back on line very quickly. We could not get into our rooms until 1:30 so we decided to go to the Lido deck for lunch. After a nice leisure lunch--great food as usual--we decided to take a tour of the ship. We went to check out our room and it was ready before 1:30 so we went into our room. Only one bag was in our room and we began to think that one had been misplaced. Eventually, it did show up.

We continued our tour of the ship until it was time to go to the dining room for dinner. We had reserved the first sitting for dinner which was at 5:45 PM. We had requested a table for 6, but got placed at a table for 4. We were seated and we waited for awhile to see if another couple came to our table. No one did so we had a nice quiet dinner by ourselves. As it turned out, there was another couple who were supposed to be at our table, but they never showed. We had a table by ourselves for the entire cruise which was nice.

We went to the theater to watch the live show for the nights which was a preview of all the entertainers for the week. We enjoyed the show and, based on what we saw, decided to watch the show each night.