My family has been absolutely hooked on cruise vacations for 6 years now. We've been on eight cruises (4 Royal Caribbean, 4 Carnival) and enjoyed each one for different reasons. It is the ultimate vacations for Moms - once you're on the boat and unpacked, the vacation just unfolds before you! We live in Orlando, so Pt. Canaveral is our port of choice - 45 minutes to the parking lot, dump the luggage and head for the embarkation line. We missed filling out our immigration forms so we had to stop to fill that out, but used the Carnival web site to do our Fun Pass and just breezed through the line. Using the web site, we had to make a quick call to Carnival because new passports do not have an issuing city, but filling it out on-line made the process far less painful. We had been on The Glory several years before so we tried to reacquaint ourselves with the boat before the dreaded life boat drill. Glory is absolutely glorious but difficult to get from bow to stern on the public decks. Absurdly if you're in the Amber Palace Showroom and need to get to the Platinum Dining Room, you must go upstairs to walk to back of the boat then downstairs to get to the Dining Room.

To my husband's and teenage son's great delight, the boat had a tremendous amount of spring breakers- mostly pretty young women - aboard from both the US and Canada. Drinking was way up and for the most part they behaved themselves, but I was rather alarmed by the way the staff would continue to serve an already (obviously) drunk person. At a late night comedy show, one young lady was celebrating her birthday and I really thought before the show was over she was going to show us the top half of her birthday suit. She didn't, but they kept bringing her drinks during the show even though she was heckling the comedian, constantly jumping up, screaming and twirling some sort of pom pom. She was definitely the side show. The performer was hilarious and handled the situation well. Really got to say here there were more comedy shows this trip and we loved them!

Having taken this itinerary before, we didn't plan side trips this time. We got off the boat at Cozumel and to our delight found they have finally recovered from that horrible hurricane season 2 1/2 years ago. A visit last year was truly heart breaking to see the level of destruction the storms left. This year we found a new pier (no tender!) and many many new shops and plazas. The beer is still pleasantly cheap, so we settled in at sidewalk cafe had beers and chips and did some awesome people watching. This is definitely the shopping stop of the trip. The selection is almost overwhelming. The other stop in Mexico was Costa Maya, a place my husband dubbed Tourist Trap Island. Take a side trip there! Enjoy it in other ways unless you really need to buy something else, you're like fresh meat to the buzzards there. When we got off we found it very very crowded, and prices very high. Although, when we showed passing interest in some cowboy boots the price dropped from $650 to $250 instantly - so bargain! Read more