We sailed on the Explorer out of Bayonne NJ with some friends on a short 5-day cruise to Bermuda in May. The weather and the sea conditions were near-perfect. I guess I should have read some more of the reviews before we "seniors" booked this cruise. The ship was too big, too crowded and too noisy for our taste. We spent many hours waiting for elevators as the proliferation of baby strollers took up so much space. The dining room was so noisy we could barely hear each other talking at the table. I would suggest providing a dedicated dining area for families with young children and especially infants -- even the best-behaved 3 year-old gets noisy and cranky after being forced to sit in one place for over an hour. If I wanted to eat with my grandchildren every night I would have stayed home.

I must be getting pretty old and cranky myself because this cruise seemed to be filled with more overly tattooed, sloppily dressed, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking and foul-mouthed 20's and 30's than I have ever seen in my 25 years of cruising. So many people don't seem to know the difference between their "inside" and "outside" voices...The parents of the family next door was using the cabin as a baby-sitter for their pre-teen children who were left unsupervised several nights. The children were obviously physically playing as they kept bumping into the interior cabin walls and ran the TV at a loud volume.

Be careful of the information published in the daily activities list; there were numerous errors, including some which sent me to the wrong deck or wrong time for different events. In addition, the dinner menus at our table were different, the name of the Dining Room (da GAMMA) was misspelled on our Seapass card (There were 1000's of those printed)...they need a good proofreader before printing the daily information. Read more