To begin, our traveling party was my family (mom, dad and 2 kids, 4 and 9) and another family (mom, dad and 10 year-old kid). Both sets of parents have cruised before, but it was the first cruise for all three of the kids. We were making the trip down to Port Canaveral from NE Georgia. Definitely come down to Port Canaveral from I-95, not I-75. Our friends had a wedding to go to in Pensacola the night before and spent a large amount in tolls on the Bee-Line tollway from Orlando to Cocoa Beach. They didn't have a choice in route. We on the other hand, spent $0 driving to Savannah first and then down I-95.

We left the day before we sailed and stayed at the Country Inn and Suites. The room was booked through hotels.com and I was able to add the cruise parking to my reservation by calling the hotel directly and modifying the reservation to include a shuttle to the cruise terminal. While I would stay here again and take advantage of the shuttle service, I will probably opt to stay at the Radisson next year when we cruise for two reasons. The first being that they totally screwed up my reservation when we checked in. I arrived at the hotel around 4pm and attempted to check in. Unfortunately the desk clerk couldn't find my reservation. After about 10 minutes of looking and using my confirmation number, he discovered that I had already "checked-in". It turns out that the staff checked in a person with a different name (last name too!) into our reservation. After a long wait, we were finally checked in and as a mea culpa, they comped our parking for the week. It seemed that the hotel was extremely busy with check-in when we arrived and they had already filled the first two shuttles for the Sensation by the time we arrived at the front desk. The second reason I would choose the Radisson is that their shuttle(s) seemed to be coming and going at a much quicker rate at debarkation. Even though we had a fairly early debarkation number, we were waiting curbside until most of the ship was out of customs before we caught the shuttle back to the hotel.

Embarkation was a breeze for us with VIP check-in. We arrived at about noon and were on board in a relatively short amount of time. There was a line outside the terminal for the non-VIP passengers, but it was moving rather quickly and it didn't seem that those people were tired of standing in line. Once on the ship, we were able to find a table on the Lido deck for us to set our stuff down and find something to eat at the buffet. The lines for the burgers and Mongolian Wok were long as they always were, so we scoped out the buffet. There were much shorter lines inside, except for the Deli and Pizza area. Plus, it seems that everyone had decided to sit outside and there were plenty of spots to sit down inside the Lido restaurant. Read more