Jewel of the Seas Embarkation Day!

We woke up at 9:30, showered and re-packed. We checked out of the hotel, paying the required city tax in cash, and then waited outside for Maurizio. A group of ladies sitting across the courtyard were also waiting on transport to Civi but to another cruiseline...I can’t remember which.

 Maurizio showed up on time and carrying 3 other couples in the van all headed to the Jewel. We introduced ourselves and chatted during the 1 hour drive. They were all from Utah and it was a first cruise for a couple of them. I told them they’d now be spoiled for all future cruises!

 Maurizio seems to have playlists for his drives and sang a majority of the way there. Thank god the highway was mostly open traffic. He is very skilled at driving in Italy and somehow managed not to hit any of the cars he was speedily passing. I don’t want to discourage anyone from using his service at all! He was very communicative and obviously the price was right for us.

Here he is playing the air guitar for us
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We arrived at port and pretty much walked straight onto the ship. I had preprinted our luggage tags and already had them on the bags in plastic holders ready to go.

This was by far our fastest on boarding ever. Straight to the counter for our sail pass cards (on the back of them were taped our individual WiFi passwords which I had prepaid for when I saw a huge deal pop up) and then straight from there onto the ship. No waiting at all!
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The VOOM and soda package for me was $217 and VOOM for fiancé $100.

 We went straight to Windjammer for food since we hadn’t eaten yet and weren’t going to be functioning well for long...f3f39765e27655208668369111ab03bd.jpg

Our muster station was outside on deck 5: v17 and it was HOT! Luckily we got out there towards the end of the group so were e27a894e1590e74bf511337b5bf3ccf0.jpgable to stand in front, but I felt bad for the people in the back.

After dinner we grabbed cash from the room and went to the casino for roulette.

We both lost it all and pretty quickly...the casino has a very strong smoke smell even though there were signs posted saying no smoking and I didn’t see any ashtrays around...

After our hard losses we consoled ourselves with dessert #2 in the WJ...which sadly closed at 10 on Jewel. The only late night food venue is the solarium cafe which was really disappointing.

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