I will start off by saying that this was our very first cruise and I was thankful for the Cruise Critic website. This website truly helped me in planning my cruise and I highly recommend joining the Meet and Mingle group. It is a wonderful way to get to meet new people on board and someone had started a Roll Call for our cruise and it was nice to post on line prior to the cruise.
The Explorer of the Seas is a large wonderful ship. Overall we found the ship to be clean and the crew seemed to go out of the way to help you.
We flew into Fort Lauderdale the day before and then drove down to Miami. We rented a car through Hertz and we dropped it off in downtown Miami that morning and they shuttled us to the port. Hertz is great because they do not charge a drop off fee. We reversed the process when we returned from the cruise.