Saturday, Getting on the Ship

 After going to bed so early, I got up about 6, and John at about 7. When we went down to find some breakfast, the lobby restaurant wasn't open, and looked like it was undergoing renovations or something, with a ladder and some tools in the middle of the floor. Other guests told us there was a coffee shop down by the entrance, so we went down and got some breakfast sandwiches and drinks and took them to our room. Our phones worked, so John had a long call with a fellow Klingon while we waited to check out. He wanted to call another friend, but realized he didn't have that friend's number. We checked out just before 11, and I sat in the lobby with our luggage while John went outside to take pictures. He came back about 11:15, and we moved out to the driveway, trying not to miss the taxi, which was due at 11:30. We found the taxi, the driver got us to the dock just fine; it was a much shorter trip than from the airport.

We had never gotten luggage tags for the ship, so we had to go inside and find the table set up just to deal with that problem. We discovered our cabin had been changed from 4005 to 8197, so we thought we had gotten an upgrade. Turning over our large suitcases, we could now check in, and we let them take a couple pictures before we got on the ship. Of course our cabin wasn't ready for us yet, so we found our muster station and checked in, went to the buffet for lunch and then to the Pink Champayne Bar for drinks, where a trio was playing Hawaiian music.

About 3, they finally announced we could get to our cabins. Ours was hidden in a maze of hallways in the aft of deck 8, and I almost walked past it. When we walked in, our hearts sank. This was not an upgrade! There were 2 bunkbeds attached to the walls, each sticking into the room about 12 inches. The walkway on either side of the bed was about 14 wide, so we had to contort ourselves to get in and out of bed. We asked for the main bed to be split in two, leaving a larger walkway between them, but it wasn't done before we went to bed. Getting in and out was a miserable as we had imagined.