Fort Lauderdale – Day 2

There is a very nice breakfast in the lobby of the Embassy Suites.  We always prefer a room service breakfast but that is not an option here.  Most hotels where we stay around the country have some sort of buffet style breakfast in the lobby in lieu of a delivered room service breakfast.  We have started carrying a cafeteria style tray with us, so I can go to the lobby and load up the tray with plates and drinks and bring them back to the room.  I will be bringing it with me on the cruise to help with some self-service room service from the Lido Deck.

After breakfast we spent the morning looking thru some of our bags and reviewing what we packed and trying to remember if we missed anything of major importance.  We didn’t discover anything significant missing.  Good news!

Weather Improves

Poor weather continued this morning with high winds and rain showers making the prospect of going outside very uninviting.  The weather improved shortly after noon when the clouds cleared, the sun came out and it stopped raining.  It was still very atypical Florida weather:  blustery (23 mph wind) with temperature in the 50’s.  But we expect no sympathy from the folks who are going thru a real cold spell with subzero temperatures in much of the USA.

One of the good things about this location is that we are right across the street from the Southport Shopping Center.  We didn’t need to specifically get anything, but we wanted to look around and see if there was anything we may spot that we just couldn’t live without for 4 months.

There are quite a few shops within a half mile of the hotel and we went thru 4 of them in about 90 minutes before we headed back to the room.  Even though the sun was out, the high winds did not encourage you to spend too much time strolling around.

Cookies!

We did find a couple items that we just couldn’t live without – Two boxes of Knotts Berry Farm shortbread cookies – I mean running out of snacks on a cruise ship??  I guess it could happen!

While taking this picture we noticed our nice view and spotted the ms Koningsdam at Terminal 4 over at Port Everglades – off further in the distance was the Prinsendam and the Veendam, but we couldn’t make them out very well from this distance.

We enjoyed dinner this evening at a local seafood restaurant:  Kelly’s Landing.  Joining us were 3 other folks who are joining us on this knitting cruise.  It was nice to share experiences and enjoy some good New England style seafood.  Service was prompt, the food outstanding with modest prices – an excellent value.

The adventure begins tomorrow

Our great adventure starts tomorrow, and we are looking forward to a wonderful cruise.  We will be back in Fort Lauderdale on April 28^th and spend a couple of days here before we board the Crystal Symphony to ride back to the West Coast.  We had originally planned to stay aboard the ms Amsterdam as we did in 2016, but she will be in the shipyard for about 12 days and once we saw the timing of the Crystal Symphony we decided to give her a try and see what its like on a Crystal ship.

A few notes about the blog.  You will find one of the Menus labeled Cruise Blogs – links to my previous cruises as well as a map view with links to the current posts for this cruise.  If you are interested in finding what happened in any particular port, you can go to the map index and select the marker for the particular port of interest.

You will also find a table that lists the complete itinerary, with a link to each day’s menu, the daily “When and Where” program and the name of the entertainers in the Queens Lounge.  That page also has a link that shows the route of this entire world cruise along with markers that list the name of the port along with the date of our visit.