My Wife and I cruised on Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas from November 26th to December 3rd, 2006. This was a seven night Eastern Caribbean cruise that departed on a Sunday out of Port Canaveral, Florida. The cruise visited CocoCay-Bahamas, St. Thomas-USVI, Philipsburg-St. Maarten and had three days at sea. While we have been to all of these ports before, less Port Canaveral, we have never been on a cruise with three full sea days, we hoped we wouldn't get bored (we didn't!) We stayed in a Grand Suite on Deck 10. This was our twelfth cruise with RCCL, making us Diamond Crown and Anchor (C&A) Society members.

A little about us. I am a Director of Finance and my wife is a Realtor; we are 40 and 35 years old, respectfully. We have very much enjoyed the entire RCCL experience for over 10 years and are very loyal RCCL passengers; we have always been treated exceptionally well by RCCL. We consider ourselves to be active cruisers, wanting to do more than lay in the sun, we normally cruise every 12 to 18 months; we have chosen to keep cruising the Caribbean because we enjoy it so much - we do not have a strong desire to cruise Hawaii, Mediterranean, Alaska, etc & We go into every cruise with a great attitude, we understand that sometimes things out of anyone's control happen (i.e. weather, simple mistakes - we are all human, the fact that people have a variety of tastes, etc) - we just know we are going to have a great time. In fact, our biggest pet peeve is cruisers that are so arrogant they don't think rules apply to them, or so inept to think everything should be 'free' and perfect, all the time. That being said, we had a wonderful time and following are some remarks to pass along about this cruise.

Pre Day. We always arrange our own airfare and arrive at the Port City a day before embarkation. We arrived in Port Canaveral Saturday the 2nd. Port Canaveral is at least an hour away from any major airports, so a rental car is more cost effective than most shuttles or taxis. We arrived in Port Canaveral mid-afternoon and checked in at our hotel, the Residence Inn Cape Canaveral Cocoa Beach. This was a very nice and clean hotel at a reasonable price, approximately $120 for one night. The town of Port Canaveral is quite small; we circled it in the rental car in less than one hour. We had dinner at Papa Vito's Pizza Shoppe (excellent home made pizza) and got back to the hotel at sundown. A great logistics note - Avis has a rental car location in downtown Port Canaveral, they will shuttle you to and from the Pier - it is less than a 5 minutes from the hotel and the shuttle ride is less than 15 minutes to the Pier. Read more