Embarkation Day-Finally Done!!

Ok, I know that a lot of people have been asking me about when Embarkation day was going to be continued.....Sorry, I know it's been a while. School has really been consuming my waking time and when I am at home, I'm just too tired to post. It's not that I don't have the energy to tell the stories, it just takes me FOREVER to get through the pictures to choose a good representation of our time. We just took so dang many!!

Anyway, here we go with Embarkation day. These are just a few snapshots of our first day on board. So, here ya go!!

In the picture below, Donia is on our balcony, and I was on my parents' balcony taking her picture. We were all supposed to have rooms in a row, but it just didn't work out that way, which was a bummer. But we weren't too far from eachother, just about 6 rooms between my parents and I, and then 6 between my parents and Christie, Jeff and Chels.

We actually unpacked all of our clothes this time. Since we were going to be in the room for 7 days this time, we decided that would be best. We were actually impressed with ourselves because we neatly unpacked everything and our room was REALLY clean and tidy. My mom was shocked! :-) The first cruise we just lived out of our suitcases but that made for a really messy room. Anyway, this brings me to the following picture. D and I decided to just put all our shoes together, since we often wear eachother's shoes. As we were unpacking it was getting pretty clear that we had brought quite a few pairs.....in fact I think we counted at least 26. Hehe, I know it's pathetic. The really sad thing is that this is a VERY small sampling of how many shoes we both actually have. So, here is the shot of most of our shoes (obviously almost only flipflops!) in the drawer we kept them in.

A shot of the elevators in the atrium area, can you believe this is in a SHIP on the OCEAN????

Being goofy in the cabin:

This map is on the wall near some of the bars. It is pretty cool because it shows where the ship is in relation to our whole intinerary. We looked at it each day!

Hehehehehe:

I have some weird thing about taking pictures of my feet. Here's the first of many that I took of my piggies.....

Chillaxin' on the balcony:

Checking out our first sunset:
I thought this was pretty cool. The ship and the sun were both in just the right spot for us to get shots of our shadows on our balcony wall:

After the sun went down we went to dinner in the dining room. We met our FREAKING AWESOME waiters Johnathan and Joel. They took such fabulous care of us. I will talk more about them later when I show some pictures. Here are a few shots of our first dinner:

Ok, this last picture does need a bit of explanation. On our first cruise there was one guy on staff who I had a super crush on. He was working on the Fantasy back then as one of social hosts. The social hosts are in charge of having tons of fun onboard. They lead pub crawls, games, contests, etc. Anyway, they called him Papa Smurf. At one point he had blue hair even. I was so in love with him!! He was hilarious, very cute and was always around the ship where we would see him having fun. I went so far as to take a picture OF HIS PICTURE on the wall....lame I know! I never really got close enough to get a good real picture of him.

So, you're probably asking yourself, why is she telling us about Papa Smurf when he was on her first cruise? Well, I'm about to tell ya!! We were at dinner on the first night, when the Matre 'D introduced the assistant cruise director Henny. I was eating and halfway listening really. But then I heard his voice.....it was PAPA SMURF!!!!!!! He has been promoted to Asst Cruise Director and is now on the Conquest! Oh, and he goes by Henny now-his real name. I guess the promotion made him want to grow up a little and drop the cartoon nickname. I was so so so so so excited. I think all the people at my table thought I was nutso!! So, I ran up to take his picture, I didn't even care that people were looking at me funny (including Papa Smurf). But it was pretty dark in the dining room, so the pictures didn't really turn out very well.

Then, as we walked out of the Welcome Aboard Show later that night, Christie said, "Look, it's Papa Smurf!!!!!" I RAN, and I mean RAN up to him and said, "Can I PLEASE have a picture with you??" I then went on to tell him that I had seen him on the Fantasy and we talked for a few seconds about that and he was super proud that he was promoted and showed me his new nametag with Asst CD on it. Ok, so THAT is the super long story behind the following picture. And he is making a pretty funny face in this picture, but it doesn't hold a candle to all the rest of the funny faces that he usually makes. He is the king of really weird faces!
Pretty soon, it was time to head back to the room, and our first towel animals were waiting for us. Awww, she had a baby!!
That's it for now!! Next time will be Day 2 and Tropical Storm Dolly!!!