4:47 AM: The Moment I Fell in Love with Sea Days

I'm not a morning person. Like, at all. I'm the kind of person who hits snooze five times and still shows up to work looking like I've been through a wind tunnel. So when my best friend Sarah shook me awake at 4:30 AM on the first sea day of our Celebrity Constellation cruise, my initial response was to pull the pillow over my head and groan something that was probably not very kind. "Come on, you're missing it," she whispered urgently, already dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie. "I went to the bathroom and looked out the porthole. You have to see this." I cracked one eye open. The cabin was still basically dark, that weird pre-dawn darkness that makes you question all your life choices. "Sarah, it's not even five in the morning. There's a midnight buffet. There's a casino. There are multiple shows happening at actual reasonable hours. Why are we awake?" "Because I read on CruiseDeckLife that the sunrise from the top deck on the first sea day is supposedly life-changing. And I'm not wasting my vacation being the person who missed it because she needed her beauty sleep." She had a point. I'd read the same thing. And honestly, I'd been skeptical—the kind of skeptical you get when yo…