We always head to the port the day before we sail.  While it's only a four hour drive from our home to the port in Galveston, the traffic through Houston (the 4th largest city in the country) can sometimes be horrendous.  By leaving a day early, we can take our time packing and making the drive, and we don't have to get up so early the next morning and can still get on board as soon as they start boarding.  I've never understood the people that wait until the last minute to get on the ship.  I guess some people have flight delays and other things to do, but the way I see it, they're missing 4 or 5 hours of the vacation they paid for.

This has been a busy day.  I started at 7:30, heading to the gym.  I'm three weeks into my workout routine and need to keep it up while we're on the cruise.  Anyway, I got back home and started packing (with my checklist), and then we went to Alex's basketball game (they won 34-23).  He's going to miss tomorrow's game, but that's just one of those sacrifices you have to make.  After the game, we went back home, because we had forgotten to pack jackets.  Last year on our Christmas cruise it was freezing when we got back to Galveston, so we wanted to make sure we had something other than shorts and t-shirts to wear.  The drive to Galveston was uneventful.  It takes about four hours from San Antonio.  Traffic wasn't too bad.  When we got to Galveston we could still see a lot of the mess left by Hurricane Ike a few months ago, but it looks like they're quickly getting things back to normal.  We stayed at the Hilton in Galveston.  Really nice hotel, and they offer shuttle service to the pier (plus free parking while you're gone), but by the time we arrived we couldn't get scheduled for a shuttle until 2:30 and we didn't want to wait that long to leave tomorrow, so we decided to drive over and pay for parking at the pier.  We had dinner at the hotel.  The food was really good.  A little pricey, but I was certainly full by the time we were finished.  While we were waiting for our food to come, Alex was talking non-stop and a mile a minute.  I don't know what got into him, but I just burst out laughing when he was talking about something then suddenly, without any change in inflection said "Are those monkey bars?  They look like monkey bars."  It was actually a trellis that went over the sidewalk, but the way he said it was hilarious.  We had a real nice room, although the three of us had to squeeze into two double beds.