The Life and Times of the Boss Lady: Our Enchantment of the Seas Cruise

I have neglected my blog. One reason was because I was gone on a CRUISE!! Then once we got back work got crazy again.

But I am back to give you a day by day review on our trip. If you would like to go ahead and read my full review you can check it out at http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1912863 . I am in the process of putting my full review online there.

This was my fourth cruise but my first “family” cruise. So I may have been more excited for this cruise than any other, besides maybe my very first. Husband and I have always sailed just the two of us, with the exception of one cruise where we met up with some friends and cruised with them. Our dear son has been too cool to vacation with Mom and Dad the last several years, so you can imagine how excited I was when he asked if I would plan a cruise and take him. I started planning immediately of course!!

I chose the four day to the Bahamas out of Port Canaveral. It worked perfectly because 1) My son's girlfriend was coming with us and she could only miss so much school. 2) I had never been to the Bahamas and 3) I wanted to sail from Port Canaveral. During the planning my brother in law and a friend of ours starting asking us about cruising and costs. So I did some research for them, and told them they could do an inside for right under $500 each. They decided to tag along with us.

I was now planning for six of us. I got to experience the process of having two rooms booked, getting our dining linked, and getting us all to the ship! Royal Caribbean was great with all of this.

After the next couple months I planned excursions and read everything I could about the Enchantment. I put together these goodie bags for the “kids”.

I saw these cute bags at cracker barrel and thought to myself I could do something neat with these bags. I decided before I even left the restaurant that they would be treat bags for the cruise. I filled them with snorkel equipment, beach shoes, a beach towel, and snacks for the trip to the port.

Finally its time for us to leave! The cast for this story will be:

Terri-myself

Tony-my husband

Tabor- our 20 year old son

Loren- Tabor's 21 year old girlfriend

Shane- Tony's brother

Brian- family friend

We headed out at 10pm because Tony decided he wanted to drive straight to the port this time. Our normal routine is to take a couple of days and take our time. But we had a lot of work going on and Loren had school so this was not an option this time. It did make me nervous about something happening but luckily it didn’t and we pulled into Port Canaveral at 12:30.

Me driving, This is after I changed my shirt after spilling coffee all over me.

First glimpse of ship.

We stopped on our way in to put luggage tags on everything because I wasn’t sure if we would be dropping off everything before we parked or not. We ended up parking and then carrying our luggage to the porters, so there was no need stopping ahead of time. We could have done it right there in the parking lot. But I needed to change my coffee covered shirt anyway, so no big deal.

The parking lot is right beside the terminal so it was just a matter of crossing the parking lot and dropping everything off with the porters. This pic was taken in the parking lot by our van.

Since we had a suite we had priority boarding and was checked in fast. I would say it was 15 minutes or less and we were ready to board the ship. But...we decided we had better wait for Shane and Brian since this was their first cruise. We waited maybe another 10 or 15 minutes on them.

Shane and Brian are somewhere all the way on the other end of the terminal.