May 4: Embarkment Day! The past weekend was typical of every year, but now we're about to board a cruise ship... and I'm just days away from returning to MEXICO!!! Wooooo! The Carnival Legend. We went with this cruise because it's the only one that is seven days out of Tampa. It stops in Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Belize, and Roatan (an island off the coast of Honduras.) Four countries in four days with a day at sea at each end. I'll start with Sunday. We woke up early to return our rental car and grabbed a taxi to the Port in Tampa. As we went around the corner and saw the ship, wow. That ship is pretty big! (I guess it's the middle class and size.) With Carnival, if you either are on your 10+ cruise or have booked a suite/penthouse, there is a VIP area to expedite your boarding. Because we booked a suite, we made our way through VIP and were on the Lido deck having a little bit of lunch by 12:15. What sucks is that my appetite still hadn't really came back until like Thursday, but I still enjoyed what I could.... just not the 24 hour pizza available on board. That really sucks because pizza has always been of of my favorite foods and I was looking forward to 24 hour pizza. Anyways, we could get into our room after 1:30, so that's when we found room #6197. A nice room; pics to come soon, I hope. We settled into our room and chilled a little and explored the ship a little. We were assigned early seating for dinner, but were able to change it to late seating. It works better for us to eat at 8:15 instead of 6 because like the day we were at Cozumel we weren't supposed to be on ship until 5:30, and I wasn't sacrificing a minute of Cozumel. Besides, we could watch the sunset on deck each night right before dinner. It worked out well. At 3:45 we had to do the Muster Drill, where they show you the procedure of lifeboats and how to wear your life jacket. 4:00 was sailaway, so we watched the takeoff on the Lido and Sun decks. We were at the far north part of the Tampa Bay, and it took a couple hours to clear the Bay. We just watched the area go by and the cops running blocker for us. About 6:00 we were going under the Sunshine Skyway. As we are going under the bridge, there is only five feet of clearance between the very top of the fin of the ship and the bridge! We used the shipping channel between Fort DeSoto and Egmont Key. It was so cool to see those places I feel I know so well from that angle, and took plenty of pics of them. It was awesome to just chill in the sunshine. We dressed for dinner and watched the sunset. We were led to our table, which was nice because it was a window seat. It was a table for 6. Our assigned tablemates joined us soon, but it was just one couple. They were a nice couple from Seattle who were celebrating their 25th. We didn't know who we'd have for tablemates, but were happy with them, and them with us. We all came to enjoy wrapping up our days together. We closed the dining room each night it seems talking. This night, we checked out the nightclub for a while. When we went back to our room, we found the first of our nightly towel animals, a stingray.
