Bon Voyage! - Day 1

We woke up early, packed on bags in several cars, and headed to the Port of Miami. The level of excitement was pretty high. Boarding the ship was a lot faster than I remember. We did wait in several lines - security, ticketing, security again - but it wasn't that bad. Once we had our boarding passes, we took this family picture before boarding the Carnival Valor. 

Boarding took about half the day. Once on the ship, we had go through a little safety drill. The last couple cruises that I've been on required you to have a lifejacket on during the whole thing. I guess it's been a while and we didn't have to do it this time! As soon as we were done, we headed straight to the Lido Deck for some food. On cruises, eating is what we do. Previously, I had never cared much for the food on cruises. But now that I cook my own food and wash dishes, I loved the idea of all this food being effortlessly available to me. It was awesome. 

So, I was really excited to get to our rooms. I paid to have our room decorated for our 6 months of being married anniversary. I also had Damaris' room decorated saying "congrats." Damaris gets to her room and is surprised. Success. I have Blaine open the door to our room and...there's nothing there. To him, it was perfectly normal. To me, it was horrible. I had planned this months in advance. I started crying and he had no idea what was going on. I finally told him and we called Guest Services to see what happened. The shipment of the "Happy Anniversary" decorations never came in. Our money was refunded but I was still disappointed. After several days of talking to Guest Services, Blaine was able to get me a free Carvnial scrapbook with a kit. So I guess it all worked out in the end...

Another bad thing that happened - one of my sisters' bags never made it to the room. This bag had almost all of Bruce's clothes and almost all of my sisters' shoes. The thing is that I hadn't brought many shoes since we have the same shoe size. I was planning on sharing with her. That wasn't really the problem. The worst part was that Bruce didn't have clothes and they had a lot of stuff worth quite a bit of money in that bag. This was definitely stressful, but we calmed down and hoped it would show up soon. 

The rest of the first day was pretty relaxing. All of us took naps at one point or another to recuperate from the previous night's lack of sleep. We took some time to explore the ship before going up for dinner. Again, the food was great. Now, the most anticipated moment of the cruise for many of us was the famous warm chocolate cake. We had this every single night. It is so good. A good friend of mine gave me a recipe for it that's perfect, but again, not having to do it myself was great. After dinner, we played the controversial game of Monopoly Deal till we were too tired to play. We headed to bed, knowing that we needed to save our energy for our day at Half Moon Cay, Bahamas.