Day 1: Thursday, February 26, 2026

NOTE: Each day of our trip will include the expected plan (timeline) for the day next to the actual timeline followed.  I had what I THOUGHT was the final schedule for the first leg of the cruise a couple of days before we flew to LGB, but it turns out that it kept changing up until we boarded.  Nevertheless, I did have time to pre-plan a timeline based on the information I had, and as such the Plan vs Actual for leg 1 is pretty complete.  Since the schedule for the second leg didn’t get finalized until we were onboard during leg 1 I didn’t have the same opportunity to pre-plan the second leg.  As a result, there’s less chance to compare a plan vs actual on the second leg.   I also noted too late that the dates heading each column are wrong.  “Wed 2/26/25” should be “Thu 2/26/26”, and so on for each successive date.

I had planned to book us into the Best Western Plus Hotel at the Convention Center as this would provide us with nicer restaurant choices than our prior choice of the Homewood Suites at Long Beach Airport.  Unfortunately, when I finally got around to making a booking in late December 2025 the BW was, rather surprisingly, fully booked.  I kept trying over about 10 days to see if I could get in but finally had to give up and find a different place.  None of the other downtown places (with space) appealed.  Several were too expensive ($300+ for a night) or too sketchy.  So ultimately, I fell back to the Hilton properties again.  This time, I decided to try to lower cost (but higher rated) Hampton Inn at Long Beach Airport.  This is the building-mate to Homewood Suites, so the location still allows us to tap into the big shopping center in the area near the airport.  Last time, I’d picked the Homewood because they, in theory, had a better breakfast than Hampton – but we failed to realize that the Homewood breakfast was behind a pass-carded door and ended up eating on the Hampton side anyway.  It was poor – but we saved about $75 or so by taking the Hampton.

The night before we left for LGB I got a message from Hilton inviting us to perform check-in and get an eKey to the room via my phone.  It took a bit of doing as I discovered that the Hilton app needed to be excluded from passing through the NordVPN tunnel in order to connect to my account, but once I white-listed the app in the NordVPN app things worked just fine. 

We also packed the night before our flight so we didn’t have to scramble in the morning.  We each took a full-sized suitcase and had no issues packing everything we wanted.  We both use some of the lessons learned from our TA on Brilliance six months previously, tweaking our clothing lists.  That meant that all we had to do before leaving the house around 1020A was to put our suitcases into the car and put our tablets into the backpack, which also held the Folder  ‘o Fun and our cable bag.  We headed to Spring Park by SJC and were in the terminal by around 11A (expecting to board starting around 1225P).  Waze was INCREDIBLY insistent that we take various strange routes to the airport.  Once we got onto 87 and it wanted us to exit at Curtner – which we did – we realized that there was an accident just ahead of us that had 87 at a standstill.  So we ended up taking a bunch of back streets into downtown before getting back onto 87 at Julian.  We arrived at Spring Park about 10 minutes later than expected, but that still gave us time to go buy deli sandwiches to serve as our pre-boarding lunch.

Our flight was 100% full, but since the only things we carried on were E’s purse and the travel backpack we had no worries about boarding.  The flight is a very quick 56 minutes from takeoff to landing, so in almost no time we were in Long Beach and picking up our luggage.  Once outside, in the supposed pickup area for the hotel shuttle, I tried calling the hotel for pickup.  Unfortunately, I got into Hold Hell and after trying twice (and wasting 15 minutes) we finally just requested a Lyft, which arrived within just a couple of minutes and we were finally at the hotel by about 245P.

The Hampton room was – perhaps – a bit smaller than the Homewood Suite room, but we find it just fine for our needs and if we ever need to book one of these places again we’ll just go with the cheapest option.  The more centrally located Best Western is still a place we should try, however. 

Figure 1: Our room at Hampton Inn Long Beach Airport

For dinner we once again made the very short walk over to The Hangar LBX, where I tried a sampling of onigiri from Tenori while E tried out street tacos from La Taqueria Brand.  We were both really happy with our choices and would gladly eat at each of them again.  Once back at the hotel we grabbed a couple of snack bags of cookies from their little store and headed back to our room for the night.