Adventure of the Seas Review
Adventure of the Seas - Southern Caribbean
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RCCL -- Adventure of the Sea Passengers on board: 3,400; 2,900 from U.S. (incl. 500 from PR). October 10-17, 2004
Day 1: Oct. 10 -- San Juan: scheduled departure - 10 p.m. We had the good fortune to stay in Orlando for a week prior to the cruise to work on our tans a little. The weather was great: sunny and hot (upper 80's) - almost no rain. Had a noon flight on Spirit to arrive into PR on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Flight was only about 10 minutes late to the gate. We could see that it had been raining, and as soon as we walked onto the jetway, the low 90's heat and humidity could be felt. Our bags must have been among the last out, and we were getting a little anxious that none of the 6 bags (from the 4 of us) were seen. But they finally showed up. The San Juan baggage area has none of the luggage carts that are usually available, either free or for rent. And only a small handful of porters were working. So we ended up wheeling our own stuff out. The area seemed under construction as we had to snake around a few barriers and hallways to finally get out to the curb.
We had reserved a Limo, and our driver was near the front of the line. So we were very shortly off to the cruise dock. I must admit that the area, as we pulled up, seemed to have quite a bit of construction activity. Several areas of construction fencing made it seem that a more expansive dock area will be there in the future. Arrived about 3:45 p.m. There did not appear to be the huge throng of people there that I anticipated from being familiar with the Miami terminal. Our driver pulled up, went and got an RCCL baggage handler to get a luggage cart and put our tagged bags in. We later found out that there was a fairly long line of passengers that had taken cabs or buses waiting to check their bags onto the ship. But thanks to our Limo driver, our bags went right on. We were then able to bypass the baggage check-in lines and proceed directly into the terminal (3:55 p.m.). We found out that they had not opened the terminal until about 3. A few of our friends that spent the night in San Juan had arrived early (12:30) to board, only to stand in the 90+ F heat for over 2 hours. They were drenched with sweat by the time they boarded.