My review is written from the perspective of a family traveling with with fairly young children. My son is 4, and my daughter turned 2 during the cruise and is still in diapers. In hindsight, I can easily see how parents of older children have a totally different experience.

We live in Houston, so we made the 60 minute drive down to Galveston and parked at an off-site lot. We had plenty of baggage too, so we got help from the abundant porters around the terminal. I felt reasonably prepared for the embarkation process, but it actually turned out to be a bit more stressful than I anticipated because I didn't expect we'd need to take a security photo at check-in time; it was a bit of a chore to get our super-excited children to stand still in the right place and look at the camera at the right time.

There was also quite of bit of confusion around the Children's Programming Checkin area. I thought I had done that online so I wasn't quite sure if we should go through the long line that snaked around a couple of pillars. In the end, we skipped it - we handled procuring our son's Mickey Band onboard the ship without any problem. (We had to stand in a much shorter line on board to get it, so I think that was a net win.) Read more