4-Night Western Caribbean Cruise from Galveston - Day 1 Embarkation Day
Embarkation
We seem to like cruising in January. To be honest, it's nice to get away after all the craziness of the holidays. And our anniversary is in January so we get to celebrate with a little vacation. In fact, we've already booked for our anniversary for next year!
As for this one, we decided to push the easy button and sail out of Galveston once again. Even though the itineraries aren't usually super compelling, we decided to give Progreso a try since we'd never been there and we found some interesting looking excursions we thought we could do. And we haven't been on the Magic in over five years so it seemed like time.
We left the house around 8:30 in the morning. We had originally intended to leave earlier. You never know what the traffic will be like, especially through Houston. We made good time though, even with two stops for bathrooms, snacks and gas (so we wouldn’t have to get any on the way home). We arrived at the port at 12:30. Last time we paid to park with a third party company and then shuttle over. This time, for not much more money I reserved in advance parking directly with the Port of Galveston and sprang for the Express Lot. This, my friends, was a great choice. It’s literally feet from the main doorway. Before we parked, we dropped the bags (it’s on the way to the lot). We were about 15 minutes early so we hung out in the car until about 12:40 and then walked over for our 12:45 PAT.
The line for security was a little bit long, but not too bad and all in all we were through security and check-in in about 20 minutes and they were already on open boarding so we went right in and up to Cabana’s for lunch at around 1:10. Since rooms were ready at 1:30, after we were done with lunch at around 1:50, we were able to go right to our room. We dropped off our stuff and Emmaline spotted some dolphins outside our porthole so we watched those for a bit before going to Disney Tunes Trivia at 2:15 while Roger relaxed in the room. After that, Emmaline went off to see when Vibe would be open and I went up to Cove and got a coffee. When I got back to the room, one of our bags had arrived so we began to unpack.
The app said the muster drill was at 3:30, which would have been really odd since it’s usually at 4. The app was, in fact, incorrect. After the muster drill, Roger went to deck 1 to speak with them about an item in our luggage they were concerned about (it was some compressed gas for his wine preservation system, which when they figured out what it was, was fine) and Emmaline and I went to look at some art at Vista. One of her teachers from last year has art on some of the ships (but apparently not this one). When we got back to the room we had our second bag (from security) so we did some more unpacking, relaxed, watched some stateroom TV and sailed away. We didn’t go to the (icy cold) sail away party.
The show for the evening was Tangled: The Musical, which we haven’t seen in a little over 5 years so we went to go see it again. After the show Emmaline went to Vibe and Roger and I did a little shopping. I got a 2023 shirt on sale, which is fine with me since we did cruise last year too (twice) so I was happy to have a shirt at about 70% off.
Dinner for our first night was in Animator’s Palate. We got to know our table mates who, we were happy to learn, not crazy. In fact their daughter and Emmaline ended up spending time together outside of dinners as well. The parents were delighted as she is apparently quite introverted. Emmaline is a lot like my dad was, instantly friends with just about anyone.
After dinner Emmaline and her new friend went off to Vibe and we stayed and chatted with our table mates for awhile before heading back to the room and collapsing into bed. I was tired from the drive and just the hustle and bustle of the day. Emmaline stayed out pretty late (until at least midnight I think).
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