Overall, I’m impressed with Celebrity. It seems a big step up from the mid-level lines like Royal Caribbean and NCL, though I’m sure it doesn’t compare with the super-premium lines such as Seaborne that get raves from our friends. I have only been on one other Celebrity cruise, a smaller ship, and that was about 10 years ago.

Our typical day on this cruise went something like this: Up at 7:30 or 8, have breakfast delivered to our stateroom veranda, then off to see the port of call unless it’s a day at sea, back in time for a salad for lunch, I work out for about 90 minutes in the gym, a cocktail or two in the quiet Passport Bar while reading a Faye Kellerman mystery, perhaps a short nap before dinner, pre-dinner drinks at the Martini Bar (my favorite bar, and I settled on the Bombay Sapphire gimlet, while my wife far preferred the Molecular Bar), dinner at 7:30 or 8:30 in either the main dining room or one of the specialty restaurants maybe part of a show, perhaps a stop at the specialty coffee shop and nightcaps at the Martini Bar or Molecular Bar before bed.

I was surprised by the diversity of the passengers on this cruise, especially in age and in country of origin. I had expected an older crowd, due to the fact that this is a somewhat longer cruise, and had expected mostly U.S. citizens. In fact, though, the passengers ranged from a few families with young kids to a lot of 30-, 40- and 50-somethings, plus plenty of older cruisers. I'm sure there were some first-timers on board, but we never met a single one. Most of the people we met had been on 10 or 15 cruises, and some were up in the high double digits. There were many Celebrity fans, with elite Captain's Club status, but also many who had cruised repeatedly with Holland-America, NCL, RC, Princess and others. Carnival was universally disparaged ("we'll never do that again"). One of our dinner companions said she would return to Princess because "their ships have washers and dryers on every deck." Read more