Flight pulled off about 30 minutes late but pilot made up the time making the actual flight about 1 hour. We touched down and headed to Terminal A rental car area to meet the Go Port Canaveral Shuttle buses ($30 pp each way). Saved about $23 by not taking an Uber/Lyft. The drive to the port was a little over 45 minutes. We had an 11:30-12:00 check in time on the Liberty. We arrived at the port at about 11:50 am and by time they unloaded the bags from the shuttle bus and we rechecked our luggage with the porters waiting right outside the bus we walked across the driveway to the entrance, it was about 12:20 and there were no visible lines at any of the check-in lanes. Not sure if that meant we were very early, but terminal was almost empty with the exception of the workers. We simply walked thru and went upstairs and by time we reached the check-in agents, they were finishing up a couple and then we walked up, showed our boarding docs, verify digital vaccine and took the S&S card photo and went right thru. That was the quickest check in at Carnival that I have ever had.
Onward to the Lido deck. I had been plotting for the last 3 weeks as to what would be my first meal onboard and had decided it would be Guy’s burgers or Seafood shack. Neither panned out. For starters, DH is a pescatarian and I didn’t want to separate from him so early after just boarding. I was down for Seafood Shack but he said he wanted to try the buffet and I went for that. I was so hungry that I forgot to take a photo of our plates, but I do know that I started with a huge salad which was very fresh, did some fruit as well, and then got some fried fish, a piece of roasted potatoes, roasted vegetables, and because the Lido tables was already packed, we went upstairs to the 10th floor seating area and I also grabbed the best piece of barbecue chicken and mac n cheese from the Ole Fashion BBQ place. The lunch was superb. I hadn’t remembered the buffet being so tasty and that BBQ chicken was so so good. We were both thoroughly satisfied. We then took a tour of the ship and eventually made it to our room on the Verandah deck (8391 – somewhat of a mistake due to the noise from Lido deck above us – maybe kitchen equipment running during the night, not sure). But we didn’t let that ruin the cruise. We just know for the future, to stay away from Verandah deck.
We met our steward briefly for the one and only time during these 3 nights. He asked when we wanted room cleaned and I said it didn’t matter to us and that any time after we leave in the morning for breakfast would be ok. I then went on to begin to make a request that each evening he leave us a bucket of ice and before I could get it out, he rudely interrupted me and said we only clean once a day. And then he realized that I was asking for ice and he said that would be fine. That was a little weird, but we moved on. We never saw him again not even when we were leaving at the end. In fact, we didn’t see a lot of stewards in the hallways as we had in the past. This might be new with COVID that they are trying to interact less with the guests, which was fine with me. He did bring ice each day for us and cleaned the room and left our towel animals. Gotta love the towel animals.