Embarkation was a breeze, once we got through a bottleneck at security. From the time we stepped out of the cab until we walked the gangway was about 45 minutes (30 minutes in the security line) and that included filling out luggage tags.

When we got to our cabin it was clean and made-up. The only thing was that we never had bedspreads like you see in the website photos. I don't know if they ran out or our room stewardess just didn't put them on the beds. No biggie, just odd. Our cabin was an obscured oceanview, category G. There were four of us sharing the space: mom, dad and two teenagers. Our cabin had two lower beds and two pullmans. It had what NCL called a single French window that was about four feet wide and floor to ceiling. The window was almost half as wide as our cabin. Most of the other cabins I saw had a double French window. Even with the obscured view, we could see plenty and had lots of natural light. The cabin didn't seem any smaller than an inside cabin we had on the Diamond Princess last summer. It had plenty of storage: four drawers,shelves below the tv, above the fridge, above the desk, and in the closet, and shelves behind the mirror in the bathroom for toiletries. The closet had about four feet of hanging space with a flip down bar to hang short stuff above and below. Our luggage fit under the beds. The cabin stayed pretty tidy with all of the places to put stuff.

I would suggest making reservations for the specialty restaurants as soon as you can. We had no problems, but I heard a few people saying that they couldn't get in towards the end of the week. The specialty restaurants we sampled were: Cadillac Diner and Little Italy (no extra charge for either) and East Meets West and Jefferson Bistro ($10/person). The rest of the dinners we ate in both the Liberty and Skyline Restaurants. Some of the meals were great and some were just ok. We had a chicken Caesar wrap in the Cadillac that I would avoid, but the chili was wonderful. The highlight for me was talking with the servers. They all wanted to talk and tell us where they were from and asked where we were from. One guy from Long Beach, CA (we are from Burbank, CA) ask if we could do him a favor. He asked if we would mind eating an In-N-Out Burger for him when we got home! Ah, the things we get homesick for! Read more