Pre-Cruise Report

So before I start sharing our daily cruise journal from our past trip, I thought I'd sort of give a background as to how this trip came about.

We certainly weren’t planning to go on a cruise this year. But I always keep my eyes out for deals, I can’t help it. Back in August, I happen to see a great price for another repositioning cruise like we were on last year. While I sat on the fence about it, Kevin booked flights home forcing me to book the cruise! LOL (but seriously, repo cruises are SUCH a bargain and often cheaper than regular cruises so we would’ve been crazy to have given this up).

 Once I had booked it, I jumped online to the roll call for our cruise and discovered quite a few people that we have sailed with before were going to be on this cruise. In fact, 2 girls that my kids befriended on last years cruise, and whom they kept in touch with since, also said they would be on this cruise. My kids were really excited about that!

Local friends of ours had always said whenever we decide to cruise again, to let them know. Long story short, they also booked this cruise with us! It is SO much fun to sail with friends!

 Fast forward to a week and a half before we were due to sail, I went online to take care of checking in and printing the needed documents. After I was about done, I happen to notice our cabin numbers were different. We always book interior connecting rooms because they are the most inexpensive which allows us to do this more often. Yes, the rooms are the size of walk in closets, but we make it work no problem.

I went to the ships deck plan to see where these new cabin numbers were at and was surprised to see we had gotten moved. I never researched other cabins since we always went with an interior cabin so I wasn’t sure what this meant. After looking it up online and finding pictures of this specific cabin, I was SHOCKED to discover that we were upgraded (free) to connecting BALCONY rooms!!! And larger than usual balcony rooms as they were the first 2 rooms on that level which meant we also had a side view allowing us to see the front of the ship!

I was ready to shout at the top of my lungs about this amazing blessing but decided I should keep it quiet from Kevin & the kids and wait till we went to our rooms for them to discover the secret. It was SO hard to keep this quiet for the next week and a half as I wanted so bad to share it with them. But I knew by waiting, it would just make the surprise all the more special!

This trip was 13 days long, leaving from our usual port we sail from in NJ and ending in Galveston, TX. The itinerary included 5 ports:

-San Juan, Puerto Rico

-St, Thomas

-St. Maarten

-Curacao

-Grand Cayman (this one was new for us)

Plus we had a lot of sea days mixed in. This was our first time on this ship, Liberty of the Seas. Stay tuned for Day 1!