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deladane

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    Phoenix, AZ (originally Long Island, NY)
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  1. I don't know the exact daily pricing to park in the garage because we used Uber. Maybe someone else can chime in about that? I don't think it will be possible for you to retrieve your car by 8:30am. Unlike most other cruises from other ports who arrive back to their homeports at like 5 or 6am, the Panorama doesn't arrive back in Long Beach until 7am. According to our paperwork, the earliest time to debark was 9:15am, and then you still need to get off the ship, through the terminal, through passport control, over to the garage, and up to your car.
  2. Thanks! Yes, we lived in San Jose for about 8 years and Strike was one of our favorite breweries. I told Jason you liked his shirt, and he was excited someone recognized it!
  3. Ugh, yea it's so hard to fly cross country with the big time zone changes. When we visited my parents in New York in August, the only direct fight back to Phoenix left around 6pm, and we landed at 9:30pm local time, which felt like 12:30am NY time, and by the time we got home, it was close to 2am NY time. That was brutal! Even still, I think you are making the right call with keeping the later flight. It's not worth the risk of missing the flight since based on peoples' replies, that traffic nightmare leaving the port of Long Beach is very common.
  4. Thanks for following along! Now that I'm done with this review, I kind of want to book another cruise too, but it will have to wait for now (I think Ian would get back on a ship tomorrow if I let him, but Jason is still in recovery mode 🤣)
  5. Isn't it so funny how two people can experience the same thing in totally different ways? Especially on a large ship with nearly 5000 passengers, and so many different things to do both on the ship and in port, everyone has a chance to enjoy what works best for them and their families. I love that about cruising! I hope you have a wonderful cruise next week!!
  6. Thank you!! So glad you enjoyed my review as much as I always enjoy yours! I made a mental note to check back in April to see how your cruise goes!
  7. I'm all caught up, just in time for your arrival into San Juan! Wishing you a wonderful cruise and looking forward to following along. Just a pointer about the mud baths in St. Lucia... I did that same excursion a few years ago. It was great, but I would recommend wearing a bathing suit you don't care about in the mud baths. Or at the very least, only wear dark colors, and definitely no white! The minerals in the mud stained our bathing suits (both mine and my husband's) and it did not come out in the wash so those bathing suits are now tinted a rust/orange color. The black parts of the fabric were fine, but the white and yellow parts... not so much!
  8. Thanks for following along! I hope you have a wonderful cruise, and please come back to tell me how it went!!
  9. I’m not sure why I didn’t think to leave out jackets or extra layers of clothing, but OMG! It was freezing outside!! We all were just wearing a thin long sleeve t-shirt, and that was not nearly warm enough. I considered searching for our sweatshirts, but I knew they were packed somewhere in one of the big checked bags, and I wasn’t even sure which one. I wasn’t going to open up and dig around both bags and right here on the sidewalk, and I figured we’d be in the car soon enough, so we just made do. Jason opened the Uber app on his phone and requested an Uber XL to take us back to his brother’s house where our car was parked. It stayed on the screen where it said it was looking for an available driver for 10 minutes, then it bopped us out to the home screen again. What?! So Jason requested the ride again. And again, after 10 minutes, it kicked us out of the request and sent us back to the home screen. We have never had this happen before, especially not in a major city, but apparently there either weren’t any XL drivers available at 10am on a Sunday morning, or none of them were willing to pick us up at the Long Beach cruise terminal. That was frustrating, so he tried Lyft. Same thing! After half an hour of trying and not getting anyone to accept our ride request, I took out my phone and tried too. Jason used Uber and I used Lyft, hoping that one of us would get a driver and then the other could just cancel the request. Finally, after 40 minutes, an Uber XL driver accepted Jason’s request. The problem was, he was still 20 minutes away! We knew it would be hard to find a different driver who was closer to the port, so we just went with it. We kept watching the car move along the map and get closer to the terminal, and watching the arrival time count down. Then, when the clock said our driver was 5 minutes away, everything came to a halt. Uh oh! Remember all of that traffic we had trying to get to the port to be dropped off for our cruise last week? Well the same thing was happening this morning! It was all so chaotic, as more and more people got off the ship and were crowding onto the narrow sidewalk, with nowhere else to go as we all waited for our rides who were stuck outside the port gates in traffic. At one point, Jason called our driver to ask if he wanted us to walk out to him in the line of traffic (not that I have any idea how Jason thought that was possible with all our stuff and just the two of us to manage it). The driver said he was dropping off a family who were going on today’s cruise so he didn’t have space for us and our bags in the car quite yet. At least we knew he wouldn’t make a U-turn and abandon us here! Finally, at 11:10am, our driver called us to say he was here! We had been standing outside on the sidewalk waiting for a ride for exactly an hour and a half. No joke, my feet and fingers were completely numb from being so cold! The only person who was happy was Ian, who was nice and warm, sitting in his stroller, snacking on graham crackers the entire time. Lucky boy! Anyway, the Uber driver said he was on the far side of the pick up area because that’s where they directed him to go when he arrived. That must have been just as frustrating for the passengers he dropped off as it was for us! So now, we had to figure out how to get all of our stuff across to his car, including crossing two lanes of cars. Jason ended up going back and forth, taking as much as he could manage on his own, and I just stayed with the pile of stuff and with Ian until the last load when we all went to the Uber together. Oye, this was definitely the worst drop off and pick up experience I have ever had for a cruise! The good news was that our Uber XL was a nice big minivan with plenty of space for all our bags. The driver was very patient as Jason installed Ian’s car seat, and soon enough, we were on the road to Jason’s brother’s house. By the time we got there 30 minutes later, it was noon. Considering we started the process to exit the ship with the elevator fiasco starting at 8:40am, it had been a looooong time since we had bathroom access! Good thing we could fix that problem at the house prior to starting our long drive back to Phoenix. We loaded all the luggage into Jason’s car, re-installed Ian’s car seat, and finally hit the road at 12:30pm, way later than we ever expected to start the 6-hour drive home. Luckily, there was no traffic and we managed to conserve gas enough to wait until the Costco in Palm Springs to stop and fill the tank and get something to eat for a late lunch. After that, we drove straight through until we finally pulled into our garage at 8pm (thanks to the one hour time change). So that’s all, folks! This cruise certainly had its ups and its downs, but overall it was a great first family vacation and hopefully we’ll get to cruise again one day soon. We don’t currently have anything booked or planned, and I’m okay with that for the time being. I’m sure a few months will pass, and I’ll start to get that itch to want to travel again. And when we do, you know I’ll be right back here to write up another detailed review upon our return!
  10. According to our debarkation paperwork, FTTF was supposed to meet at the casino on midship deck 4 at 9:15am if you had left your checked luggage outside the cabin last night. We finished breakfast at 8:40am, but we didn’t want to hog the table, so we figured we’d just go down to the casino and hang out there until it was our turn to get off the ship. We went over to the mid-ship elevators, but the touchscreen wouldn’t let us select deck 4. After trying for a while, we gave up and decided to go down to deck 5 to see if we could figure out what was happening. Jason left me and Ian with our carry on bags and went to investigate. From what he could tell, there were definitely people down on deck 4, but neither the forward nor the midship elevators were letting us select deck 4. By this time, it was 9:10am and he could see people on deck 4 were getting off the ship, so we took Ian out of the stroller and took turns carrying all of our stuff down the stairs to deck 4. There were 2 ladies in motorized scooters who were very frustrated that the elevators weren’t allowing you to get off on deck 4. Obviously they eventually got it sorted out because it’s not like Carnival would trap them on the ship forever, but we were curious how long it took for them to allow you to select deck 4 on the elevator touchscreens. Once we were down on deck 4, we joined the line of people walking off the ship. It started from the mid-ship casino entrance, went all the way down the hall to the aft of the ship near the comedy club, then it went out the door onto the outside deck below the lifeboats, and back up to near the midship elevators. It was a loooong line and a really far distance to walk with all our bags, but at least the line did keep moving forward, albeit very slowly. At one point, the line split into 2 lines and they told us to keep right because we had a stroller. The weird thing was, once we bing bonged our sign and sail cards for the last time and stepped onto the bridge, the lines became one line again to walk across the bridge into the terminal building. I’m still not really sure why they separated us into a separate line, but oh well, at least we were officially off the ship. Once we were back in the terminal, we had to walk down the long zig zagging ramp (so there was no need for an elevator with our stroller). Again, they split us into 2 lines, with passports to the left, and birth certificates to the right. Since Ian only had a birth certificate, they told us to take that line and they could process our passports with him. That meant we could fly down the ramp and bypass everyone else in the passport line. Not that I would recommend traveling with a birth certificate just so you can cut the line, but that definitely did get us down the ramp faster. At the base of the ramp, we went into an open warehouse to find our luggage. Ours was right there in front and very easy to find as we entered the room. We knew we needed a porter because there was no way we could manage 2 large suitcases, 2 carry on bags, a pack n play, a car seat, 2 backpacks, a diaper bag, and a stroller with just the two of us. Once again, I got the feeling that it was everyone’s first day of work and no one knew what they were doing. We could see a few porters at the far side of the warehouse, but we couldn’t get to them because there was a barricade set up around the checked luggage. I caught someone’s eye and he said I had to speak to this other guy because he’s in charge. Ooookay. The guy in charge said we had to wait for the porters to get cleared by customs. Shouldn’t that be something they take care of before passengers start debarking and entering the warehouse? And then once they did get clearance, the porters couldn’t get to us with their dollies because the barricades were blocking them! It was just so disorganized and really felt like none of these guys had ever done this before, when I know that can’t really be the case. Once we finally got a porter, he piled all of our stuff onto his dolly and we went to the far exit to have our documents checked. Again, this saved us some time because we were the only ones down at that exit whereas everyone else went to the passports exit. It took us less than a minute for the lady to look at Ian’s birth certificate and Jason and my passports, and then we were on our way outside to the ride share pick up location. The porter unloaded our stuff, we gave him a tip to thank him for his help, and our cruise was officially over. The timestamp on this photo is 9:41am, so it took us just half an hour from the time we joined the line to start leaving the ship to the time we were outside the cruise terminal. Not too bad at all!
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