Sunday, October 22

Judy and I were up at 7:00am.  We had coupons for two free breakfast buffets and ate breakfast in the Solaris Restaurant. It was one of the most extensive breakfast buffets I've seen.  I wanted to try everything, but didn't have the room for it.

We left the Marriott at 9:30am and got to the port an hour later.  I love the sight of the smoke stacks appearing as you head over the bridge approaching the port.  We dropped off our luggage with the porter and Judy parked the car.  While waiting for Judy in front of the terminal, I ran into Kevin O'Grady (unixadm) who was going to be our table companions with his wife Terri.  Judy arrived and we went through security and up to the main terminal area.  The party bus beat us there, so there was already a good crowd of DISers.  

We checked in and received our first gifts, a rope tie card holder.  WE also got Castaway Club member gifts.  We hung out and got reacquainted with the DIS crowd until they started boarding at 11:30am.  The boarding process is very orderly now, they assign you to a group and you are called to board by group number.  We were group 7.   We got our picture taken, were announced as we entered the atrium and with a short stop on deck 7 to see if we could sneak into our stateroom (we couldn't, the hallways were roped off), we went up to Beach Blanket Buffet for lunch.  We got our food and went outside to look for a table and ended up sitting with Jeff (copper3), Michael (M4 Travel) and his partner Mark, who were right by the door as we walked outside.

We finished eating just about when the rooms were ready.  We had stateroom 7052.  We walked into our room and there were two red and black gift boxes shaped like Mickey heads on the bed along with another Castaway Club gift