Off to the ship!

So after a nice sleep (ahh, love sleeping in a bed after you missed a night!)  we got up and had some breakfast, repacked our bags (including one dubbed the "ooze bag" since it had 2 bottles of Argyle sparkling and the diet tonic in it!) and loaded up the car to head for the airport - time to pick up our rental car and Pam and Michael's son Jordan who will be going with us.   We left our luggage in their car so they could drop it all off at once (made it simple for us, and worked in our favor later!)

After finding the rental car place (geez, who knew it was this hard!) and picking up our piece of crap white Jeep Patriot (a gutless wonder when driving) we headed for I-95 and parts south.

The drive was really easy (10am on a Friday!) and we filled up the gas tank ($5) and dropped of the car at the airport....here's where the wheels came off our adventure....there's a shuttle you can pick up at the car rental place at FLL that will take you directly to the port (very nice!) and drop you at your ship.  We walked up just as this bus was boarding, and walked right on (so far, working well)  There are 3 ships total in port today, Celebrity Infinity, HAL Rotterdam and our ship Celebrity Equinox.  The bus headed for berth 25/22 first, which is where the Rotterdam and Infinity were docked.  Our bus driver tried to take a short cut because traffic was so bad.....and ended up clipping the back bumper of a parked tanker truck.  SCREEECCCHHHHHH and to a stop we come.   Seriously?  we were close enough they told all the Rotterdam and Infinity people to get their luggage and walk, but our ship was back around the corner.....after they got the bus unstuck and we blocked traffic for like 15 minutes (all the while our driver was telling us "another bus will be by soon" for us to ride)   After another few minutes, I used the power of Google Maps to see if there was a way we could walk to berth 18 - lucky for us, we'd sailed out of this port before and I remembered some of the landmarks - it sure looked like we could make a walking adventure happen!   We convinced 2 other Equinox passengers to come with us (they looked a little apprehensive at first, but once we explained the plan decided to go along with us) especially since there wasn't another bus coming and traffic was crazy.
Took us about 10 minutes to walk over there - easy as pie!.  I didn't take any photos of the damage or our adventure unfortunately....

Getting on the ship was fairly easy - Pam had been keeping us posted and they had only opened the ship about 15 minutes before we got there, so we didn't miss anything.   Check-in once we got past security was a breeze and I had read that Luminae (the suite dining room) was open for lunch, so we headed down there.  The menu was very fancy!

I had the hamburger (was very good) and some sparking wine of course!

The hamburger was huge, I could only eat about half of it and some fries.   Time to head up to the room and drop off our stuff and get this blog worked on!  We are scheduled to sail at 4pm, with muster drill at 315pm (yuck) so we'll see how that goes.   I'm sure it will be entertaining to say the least......