New Years 2012 – Day 4

Packed and ready to go to the ship

Our time on Miami Beach is over and it is time for our first day on the ship.

We left the hotel at 9:30am and made the drive down to the airport to turn in the rental car and take their shuttle to the ship. Everything went very smoothly and we were on board the ship at 11:00am.

We dropped everything off in the cabin as they were still getting it ready and went up on deck to eat.

Then we went back to the cabin, changed into our swimming suits and sat out on the deck for a couple of hours. It was 79degrees and simply beautiful out.

Ships leaving the harbor ahead of us

After that, our cabin was ready and our bags had been delivered so we unpacked and got ready to go to the welcome aboard cocktail party given by the management of the casino,

The neat thing was that a lot of the casino staff from the Manager and Host on down we had met on previous cruses so it was nice talking to them and nice that they knew us.

We went to the opening show, which wasn’t great.

Then we walked about and finally headed for dinner in the restaurant. We are in the Aqua Class of staterooms so there is a separate restaurant called Blu that is just for the 132 guests in these cabins. It is very elegant and the service and food was outstanding.

A private island as we depart

We are eating with Vera and Jeff from Long Island who we met on the last cruise.

After dinner we went to the casino and played blackjack until we realized that it was after 2 and the time moves ahead one hour tonight.

New Years Eve was neat in that they closed the casino for a brief time while everyone celebrated.

Time for bed – night

Happy New Year – 2012 is going to be a great year.