Cruisin' to Mexico -Day 1 & 2

August 19th & 20th 

Driving from Salt Lake to Long Beach

Sometime ago Tom and I wanted to go on a cruise to Alaska and decided to do it for his 40th birthday and go June 2016.  We wanted to invite Tom's family since we don't get to do many trips with them.  As we laid out the idea, several were interested, but Bryce and Sara wanted to bring their kids and Eric and Carlee could only go in August.  We decided that since Alaska wasn't the best kid-cruise and the price went up for that type of cruise in August, we'd switch to going on a more kid-friendly cruise to Mexico the end of August.  This seemed to work great for everyone who wanted to go, excited Maren and Tim, who announced after we'd made the trip change, that they were expecting a baby the end of August.  We were sad not all of his family could make it, but it's always hard to make things like this work for everyone.

Anyway, the day arrived to leave for the Cruise.  It was the same Friday Lily was coming back from Oackcrest, so our plan was to leave that afternoon (Tom's parents, Eric and Carlee left that morning and drove all the way to Long Beach that day.  Bryce and Sara's family was leaving that evening after work.)  I decided to make surprise bags for the kids to open about every 100 miles to help keep them happy on the long drive.  Here are a few of the things I packed...

 Our goal was to head out around 3:00, but it was closer to 4:00 by the time we pulled out of the driveway.

Each of us had a Smart Water water bottle that was to be our bottle for the remainder of the trip and we'd refill as needed. 

 Lily, being exhausted from Oakcrest fell asleep minutes into the drive and enjoyed a little nap.

 The kids did really well until we were around Fillmore area, then Sophie just started to cry and wanted to get out of the car.  We were able to make it to Beaver where we stopped and had dinner.  She was much happier after that.

 We made it to our hotel in Las Vegas aroun 11pm (which felt like midnight to us) and quickly went to sleep.  Bryce and Sara arrived about the same time we did.  We all got up early the next morning (6:30) and enjoyed a quick continental breakfast before heading off in the van again.  We wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get to the pier because California traffic is always so unpredictable and we DID NOT want to miss the ship.

Just a few days earlier, there had been a huge fire in the San Bernardino mountains and the freeway had been closed.  Luckily, it was open when we drove through, but it was surreal to see the entire mountain still a dusty ash.  This picture shows where they were able to stop the fire with some red substance.  There were homes just below where the fire had stopped.

 Luckily, we didn't hit any major traffic and arrived to the Long Beach pier in the early afternoon.  We had to wait while the luggage was being tagged and loaded, wait while Tom parked the van, wait in line for security, and wait in line for check-in.  

 It was the worst check-in we've ever had getting on a cruise ship and with kids who had been cooped up in a van for two days, it was even worse.  The other lame thing was they wouldn't let us take our Smart Water bottles with us and we had to chuck them.  That made us a little mad.  We waited in a warehouse type room for probably an hour.  It was terrible.

 But soon we finally got checked in and walked across the bridge to the ship!  We all felt a little better and more excited as we approached our new home for the next week.

 The first thing we did was check out our rooms.  We were able to get rooms with balcony's for a good deal, and this was Tom and my first time having a balcony room.  

 The room set-up was as follows:  Bryce, Sara, Kate (8) and Lily (13) in a room; Hunter (15), Marcus (13), Talmage (10) and Jeff (10) in a room; me, Tom, Cedric (7) and Sophie (4) in another room.  Tom's parents room was next to ours and Eric and Carlee were down the hall in an inside cabin.

 The next thing we did was go to the buffet and grab a late lunch/snack.  It was fun to meet up with our whole group for the first time.

 There were 16 in our group (8 kids and 8 adults).  Here we are all crammed on an elevator.

 The next event was doing the safety drill.  Sophie was so tired by this point and we were again waiting so long, that she soon fell asleep.  Cedric about did too.  It was hard to be patient while waiting.

 That night we had our first dinner in the dining room.  The kids thought it was so fun to be in such a fancy place.  Unfortunately, Jeff started to get a migraine mid-meal, so I took him back to his room, got him some medicine and turned on a movie on the portable DVD player before heading back to the dining room to finish my dinner. 

 Half of our group were seated by a bay window, with a beautiful view out the back of the boat. 

Here's the three girl cousins sitting in the window.

 Leaving dinner, we ran into an elephant towel character.  The photographer obviously didn't want me to take any of my own pictures as he kept getting in my way.

 The kids were pretty tired after a long day and went to bed really well.  The hard thing with having little kids is once they were done, we had to be done.

 However, Tom and I found creative ways to still have fun.  We grabbed some pizza, hot chocolate and lemonade from the buffet (just two floors up from our room) and brought them back to our room.  We enjoyed a nice, quiet date on our balcony as we looked out upon the vast ocean and beautiful moon reflecting in the water.

Our first day on the Carnival Miracle had come to an end.