Family Cruise--Before Getting Onboard

I'm going to cover our cruise in three parts to spare anybody suffering through a SUPER LONG post. I'll cover our travel experience in this post, then I'll post about our fun onboard the ship, and finally talk about our ports.

Originally, we had planned to just drive to Long Beach and cruise from there with our three oldest kids. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do a more "tropical" cruise, like Bahamas or Caribbean. So I started researching ways to earn travel points more quickly and discovered in May that I could easily earn enough points in 6 months or less to fly the five of us to Florida. I was super excited (and a little nervous since this was new to me) about this idea and jumped right in. I signed up for two different Southwest Airlines credit cards, one after another, met the spending requirements, and did a few other things to reach the 110,000 points required to earn the companion pass. With Southwest's Companion Pass, the rewards account holder can designate one companion who gets a free flight anytime they fly for the rest of the year it was earned in, as well as the following calendar year. WOW, huh? So we earned that, meaning one of us flew for free, and with the 110,000 points, we had more than enough points to fly us all for free.

The only thing I didn't like about flying on Southwest was that we had to fly into Fort Lauderdale rather than Miami. But other than that, we were very impressed with Southwest. We each checked a bag for free, I made a mistake booking our flights and we were able to change them for free, and they went out of their way to acommodate our family. I will definitely fly with them again. (Obviously--we have the companion pass!! :) )

We had a layover in Dallas on the way, which the kids didn't mind. They were really excited about flying and thought the whole experience was just so cool!

We flew in the night before. I like to do that when cruising to make sure we never miss our boat due to a missed or delayed flight. Since we had to fly into Fort Lauderdale, I figured we ought to make the most of it, so I booked us the cheapest room I could find--right on the beach. The room was nothing to write about, but the beach was really fun. We didn't really get in the water, but enjoyed the sand and doing some wading. We didn't realize it then, but that was the only beach time we were going to get during the entire "tropical" cruise. I'm sure glad we took advantage of that morning before.