My adult daughter, Liz, had been on several cruises with different cruise lines. Shesaidsaid , ""dad you work too hard, you need a real vacation." She set the whole thing up. My hesitation was because I thought it would be masses of people mostly eating the "free" food! Boy, was I wrong!

We went on the Carnival Dream and it was a dream. The big ship added greatly, not crowded and good exercise walking on it. The dinners were excellent with the portions not too large and night quality. The crew was made up of Phillipinos who all had great attitudes. We fell in love with our chief waiter Antionio. We had a cove balcony which added greatly to the enjoyment (small breakfast each morning on it). We were below the galley which meant some noise above but I had brought a superb white noise mak. ((Dohm) which also helped with my wife's snoring.

We did excersions like snorkeling but found the ones we found on our own were better than the ship booked ones. I rented a Jeep onstage Maarten and that was the best. Spent about $200 to $325 extra per day on everything not included in the base price of the cruise. The water slides on the Dream were very good. Clean ship friendly crew. I will do my next cruise with Carnival , probably Breeze on west carribian. Only miss: I would have appreciated a non-denominational Christian church service available on Sunday morning.