25/08/2022
I read my "other" cruise group pages several times a day, and it is so exciting to see the number of people who are new cruisers! I want to go hug them for taking that step into the cruising world, and I hope they love it, fall in love with cruising like I did, and never look back.
I remember my first cruise still, from 13 years ago, as if it were yesterday. My kids were 15 and 9, (do the math to figure out how old they are now!), and we were going with my sister and brother-in-law, who had already been on a couple of cruises. Without going into a lot of sad detail, we had all had to deal with a death in the family, and this cruise was our cruise away from everything. I remember my sister asking me if I would be interested in going on a cruise, and I wholeheartedly said, "YES!" I had never been on one, but always had thought about it.
So the day of the cruise had arrived, we were sailing out of Miami on the Liberty. And she was beautiful. We arrived at the port on our hotel shuttle, and as we got to the port, I was breath-taken. This massive, white ship with windows and balconies, and just everything going on around her. The trucks and other vehicles, shuttle buses arriving, leaving, passengers lugging suitcases to their cars. My eyes couldn't move fast enough to take it all in. I felt like I was Rose from Titanic, standing there, like she did in the movie (Oh Lord, did I really make that comparison???) as she gazed her eyes from one end to the other.
I'll continue with this in the next post....
