The alarms rang at 8:00 am, but didn't wake either of us up. I had already been awake since 6:00 am, and couldn't get back to sleep, while RQS simply hit the snooze bar for another 30 minutes.
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When we finally started to move, I took my shower first and went out the door to pick up breakfast. One of the delis that I'd usually go to as Mario was closed (unusual for a Sunday morning), so I went to another one nearby. After finishing our breakfasts, we carted our bags downstairs and waited for our taxi.
Arriving at the local train station, we were a little surprised by how the change in railroad fares would affect us. No longer could we buy a senior round-trip ticket good for use one day, and for a return several days later. We now have to buy tickets before each leg of our trips, as they only offer single day use "unlimited" trips. (Yeah, right. Who wants to go back and forth into and out of New York City in one day?) As a result of the fare change, we now have to plan our arrival time at the train station more carefully, so that we don't miss a train because we didn't allocate enough time to buy our tickets.
Once at Grand Central, we took a cab to the cruise terminal, and were on the ship in less than 20 minutes. Unlike our last cruise, this ship felt crowded. It didn't help that many cabins weren't ready for occupancy until after 2:00 pm. This meant that most of the venues where one could sit down were crowded, without any room for newcomers.
Once on the ship, we checked in at our muster station (no problem, as it was right by the elevator bank we needed to use to get to our cabin.) But we didn't expect the amount of walking we'd have to do between the elevator bank and our cabin. (We were so far forward, that if we went much further, we'd be on the bow of the ship.) We dumped our carry-on luggage in the cabin (even though it wasn't officially open for us to do so) and went to arrange for our 5 specialty dining meals. (We got 3 due to the length of this cruise, plus another 2 due to my loyalty status with the cruise line.) Although there was a long line to book specialty dining, we got slots in each of the restaurants on the ship, and had one of our favorites booked for this evening.
Having taken care of the time sensitive stuff, it was time to get lunch. Unfortunately, cabins were not yet officially available to cruisers, so no one was giving up any space in the buffet. I figured that with a little searching, that we'd find a spot - but I was wrong. I ended up putting a full plate of food down in a public place for someone else to clean, and then proceeded to another restaurant for lunch. We were told that we'd have to wait for 45 minutes, which caused us to go to our cabin for 30 more minutes (again, the cabins weren't officially available yet) before returning to the restaurant for pub food.
Now that we were done for the afternoon, it was back to the cabin to rest for a couple hours. Just before 6:00 pm, we went to the ship's French Bistro for dinner. As expected, the food was yummy. Nothing in the menu has changed in 2 years, and that was good enough for RQS and me. If one goes to this restaurant, go hungry - I had a 16 ounce pork chop, and couldn't finish it! The food was good and filling, and worth going out of one's way to eat there.
After dinner, we went back to the room to relax for the evening. Being sleep deprived, it made sense for me to finally be able to rest with no time pressures.
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