Miami and Our First Days on Board

Our flight to Miami was, even for Air Canada Rouge, quite uneventful. We wondered if we would have any problems dealing with 7 suitcases, but everything went smoothly and nothing was missing at the other end.

We stayed at the Hyatt Regency Miami, which is about a 10 minute drive from the Port of Miami. At one time, you could probably see the port from the higher floors of the hotel, but that’s gone by the wayside. Now there are about three condo buildings in the way, and you can only see the tiniest bit of water if you look in the direction of the port area.

 As we had arrived around 5 p.m. and there were NFL football games to be seen that evening, we had a light dinner in the hotel’s restaurant/sports bar. Nonetheless, it was a good meal and the games were entertaining to say the least…too bad the Buffalo Bills lost.

On Sunday we went for a walk, first to locate the Truluck’s Restaurant we would be going to for dinner, and then to wander along the harbour side. The port was rather busy, as we could see six ships in the midst of their turnaround days.

               

Our stroll took us as far as the Harbourside Shops, where shopping is augmented by what seems to be a hundred restaurants and bars and a marina, all within sight of the port. We headed back to the hotel to watch the afternoon football games and then get ready for our dinner at Truluck’s.

We had originally planned to go to Joe’s Stone Crab on South Beach, but when we discovered that they were not open for lunch on Sunday, changed our plans to something a little closer. We had been to the Truluck’s location on Sunrise Ave. in Fort Lauderdale, and knew that we would not go without our stone crab if we had dinner there. It had an extra advantage of being less than ten minutes’ walk away from the hotel.

Dinner was great. Larry had a stone crab platter and Monica, who always goes for more choice when it is offered, had what is usually an appetizer platter for two as her main course. The platter included four pieces of each: fresh oysters, jumbo shrimp, a nice portion of lump crab meat, and four medium sized stone crab claws. She almost finished it!

          

Were we ready to board Crystal Serenity on Monday afternoon???? We were both positively vibrating with anticipation all morning. Our private transfer had been arranged for noon, so we were ready and waiting in the lobby at 11:45, just in case he showed up early. We waited, and waited, and then waited a little longer. Even the bellman who had our luggage on the cart came asking about it. So eventually we called the limo company to see where our car was….and it turned out that the driver had gone to the wrong Hyatt!!! An extra half-hour later, and the replacement van arrived. Traffic in downtown Miami is pretty heavy, so we arrived at Serenity’s terminal about 15 minutes later. We knew the greeting would be somewhat personal, as only 199 guests would be boarding on Monday – the world cruise guests would have some evening festivities before the other guests arrived on Tuesday – but we weren’t expecting to see both Rick Spath, the cruise director and a great friend, and Stacey Huston, the world cruise hostess, waiting at the door to the terminal building.

One of the Welcome Aboard photos

            

After arriving on the ship, and being greeted by a receiving line that included both the Captain and the Hotel Director, we dropped our extra bags off in our suite and headed out to see who was around.

The loading had already been going on for
some time before we took this photo!

In the course of the afternoon, we met up with a whole host of crew members, a few of whom had even put off going for their vacations so they could greet some of the world cruise guests, many of who they have known for quite a long time.

The evening festivities were a little low-key according to some people who have done the world cruise before. This was because there were still another 140 world cruisers who would be joining the ship in Los Angeles, after the Panama Canal cruise. There will be a somewhat bigger splash for that welcome aboard celebration. But nevertheless, we had a great dinner and a welcome aboard show from Bruce Hammond, whose show is a tribute to Frank Sinatra.

Photo from the Welcome Reception. We will be
getting all of the photos that the onboard photographers
take, so you may get tired of these at some point!

Part of the welcome festivities in the Crystal Cove

Bruce Hammond during his Sinatra tribute show

We had made a decision that we would make a real effort to keep up our exercise routine while on the ship, partly by making sure we walk our 10 miles on the Promenade Deck each week, and also by swimming and using the gym – personal training sessions were on the to-do list. On Tuesday we got a start – Monica swam for 30 minutes and we did our first 8 laps of the deck…hope we can keep it up! We also arranged our first training sessions with trainer Dragan for Wednesday.

Tuesday afternoon the rest of the guests started to arrive and we had an almost full ship for our inaugural sailaway from Miami.

Just after we pulled away from the pier.

On our way down the channel

The first sunset

             

Apparently there are some fairly heavy winds that come up in the Caribbean in December and continue through January, called the Christmas winds. We ran into these on Wednesday and Thursday, so it was a bit of a bumpy ride. Not bad enough that things were banging around, but it made walking in a straight line a little difficult. As Larry would say, watching a group of people come out of a lecture or a show was like having a back side view of line dancing at a western bar….shuffle to the left, shuffle to the right, shuffle to the middle!

The Seahorse Wave Pool in action. It made for an interesting swim!

Larry in the calmer water with Jim Brochu

The highlight of Thursday’s lecture program was a talk by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2016 spent 340 days on the International Space Station. What a great, and humorous, speaker he is! Only having 45 minutes to talk merely scratched the surface of what he could have told us, but it was a really interesting lecture.

First sushi at Umi Uma

with Scott Kelly

We reached our first port stop of Cartagena, Colombia on Friday. We had been here a few times before and the shore excursions all went to attractions we had seen already, so we did some more laps of the Promenade Deck and spent more time in the pool. We did, however, manage to take a few photos from the ship as we sailed out.

The old city beyond the small boats in the bay

The statue of the Virgin Mary in the harbour. 

Fort of Santa Cruz de la Castillo Grande at the entrance to
Cartagena Bay

 We had just left port at 3:00 as we started writing this post, headed for the star destination of this voyage – the Panama Canal. We’ll be transiting tomorrow between about 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. and we’re sure that there will be a lot of people milling about all around the decks. One of the guest lecturers on board is Dick Morgan, who was involved in the administration of the Canal from the 1970s until it was turned over to the Panamanian government on December 31, 1999. He knows everything there is to know about both the original canal and the new locks that were only completed in 2016. At the beginning of his first lecture he asked how many people had never been through the canal before, and Larry says that more than 80% of the people raised their hands! It is always a very interesting day and we’re looking forward to it.