Day -1 & -2 - 3/13-14/25 - Home to Fort Lauderdale

 Finally, it was time for our long awaited set of cruises out of Fort Lauderdale. This particular adventure started out innocently as a desire to sail on the new Sun Princess ship for a week. We booked a cabin as part of a group cruise with a YouTube creator that I follow. Sometime later, we then learned of a charter cruise on a different ship, which was a week after the end of the first cruise we booked. And we booked that cruise.  Upon checking hotel rates, I figured out that it was cheaper for us to then book a cruise bridging week one and week three and so we did that. And that's how we ended up with three weeks on two ships in the Caribbean starting on March 15. A real bonus is that the three itineraries are pretty much not repetitive.

We were able to get seats on 8 o'clock flight from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale on March 13. The flight basically takes all day to get there because of the loss of three hours resulting from the time zone change. So we arrived in Florida around 5 PM and caught the shuttle to our motel, the Rodeway Inn & Suites at the cruise port. It's a hotel we have stayed at previously. We really like his location and it has a complementary shuttle from the airport to the hotel as well as from the hotel to / from the cruise port. 

After checking in, we went next-door to the restaurant adjoining the hotel called Harbor 84 and I had chicken wings. Angela enjoyed her salad.  It was still pretty early according to our original time zone and we tried to stay up a little bit later in order to have a good nights rest. For me that didn't work. I slept for about two hours and then was awake for the rest of the night.

Breakfast is included in our room rate so we made it to breakfast just before the closing time of 9:30am and had a nice little breakfast. We then walked a mile to the local shopping mall where we checked out the stores that we had previously visited on other trips here. Unfortunately, the Big Lots store is now closed and the Winn-Dixie supermarket is in the final stages of closing, but is being replaced by an Aldi which we really like shopping at when we are in Europe. Beals Discount department store is still open and we enjoyed shopping there as well as the Dollar store and another new dollar store like store called Five Below.  While there we went to the local pizza establishment called Marina Mile Pizza, where we enjoyed a 10 inch supreme pizza in honor of PI day. We walked back a mile to the hotel and relaxed a bit.  Angela went swimming and I took a two hour nap. When I woke up, she wanted to walk back to the mall and check out a swimsuit that she had looked at earlier. So we got rid of our things and walked a mile back to the mall where she purchased the swimsuit and then we went across the street to the really nice German restaurant called Old Heidelberg. We've eaten at this restaurant several times previously and have always enjoyed it. Then it was another mile walk back to the hotel and we watched a little video before collapsing for the night. It was a good day (I logged some 14,000 steps) and we are anxious to board the ship tomorrow.