My wife and I decided to book a Carnival Cruise because they advertise themselves as the fun ship and we wanted to expose our 15 year old son and his friend to cruising. We ourselves have sailed together 4 times, once with RCL and Celebrity, and twice with Holland America. We booked the 4 day western Caribbean cruise on the Fascination out of Miami because we wanted to take the boys to Cozumel. We drove from South Carolina to Miami over two days. My first tip to anyone driving to Port Miami is to gas up your car in Fort Lauderdale before arriving at Miami. I-95 into Miami is a nightmare to drive. There are a lot of exits with no entrances back onto the highway. Most of the exits dump you into the ghettos. When you exit to get to the port you have to drive through some very rough parts of town to get to the docks so gassing up will save you a lot of grief. We paid $48 to park in the parking garage which was not too bad. The garage is in close proximity to the ship.

Embarkation: Embarkation took a little longer than expected but wasn't too bad. We pre-enrolled online and had our "fun pass" ready. Even with the fun pass there was a rather long line mainly because a lot of first time cruisers didn't have the right paperwork ready (which of course is not the cruise lines fault). After about 10 minutes at the counter we finally boarded.

On The Boat: I have heard a lot of complaints about the boat being dirty but it seemed very clean overall to me. Of course there was a spot here or there but not enough to gross anyone out. The boat is 10 years old and has overall aged very well. Our luggage arrived faster than any other cruise ship we have been on. Our bags were in front of our doors in an hour after boarding. Read more