Cruise--Day 1

The stress began when Janet's dad decided we needed to be at the airport earlier than we had planned. I expected them to arrive at my house at 8:15 a.m. but instead the doorbell rang at 8:00. The rushing and waiting cycle had begun. I rushed to throw in my last minute articles and we headed to the airport. Once we arrived, we were informed that our flight had been delayed about 1/2 hour. Not a problem if we weren't on such a tight schedule. This only left us about 15 minutes to make our connection in Dallas and little to no chance of our luggage making the transfer. Our only option, we were told, was to be placed as a backup on the next flight out of Dallas in case we missed our original flight. The problems with this plan was that our one and a half hour shuttle from Houston to Galveston would get us to the pier around 4:30 and our ship was sailing at 4:00! Luckily, I have made enough trips to Houston to know that we could probably get a flight into Hobby Airport (much closer to Galveston than Bush) and if need be, Neal could pick us up there. We were able to book a flight from Dallas to Houston Hobby and arrived in Houston around 2:30. Fortunately, we had booked all our travel through the cruise line and they called us a taxi to take us on to Galveston. We arrived at the ship about 3:30 and were the last to board. On the bright side we had no lines or waiting to board the ship and since Neal had been on board since noon, he was pretty much at home and knew where all the food was!

Shortly after finding our staterooms we were summoned to a lifeboat drill. After the drill, Joe was starving so we got sandwiches and pizza about 4:30.



Our dinner seating was at 5:45 each evening in the Monet Dining Room. First night was casual and we met our head waitress and her assistant, Victoria and Lyudmyla, who would serve us the entire week.


After dinner we browsed through some of the shops then spent the rest of the evening relaxing from our stressful day of travel.