This was our first NCL cruise. Always cruised with Royal prior. We wanted a cruise during spring break since my DW teaches college and would be off that week and we needed a break from the winter. We also didn't want to have to fly with 3 children, so driving 3 hours to NY sounded like the path of least resistance between ourselves and Bahama's weather. It was my DW and I, our three boys 4, 3 and 1 years old and a friend who came to help us with the boys and also have a vacation. We booked two adjoining Mid Ship Mini Suites with balcony rooms.

Unfortunately we didn't know that the NY marathon was happening the day we were boarding the ship (Mar 15th), we were having a friend drop us off and no matter what street we went down the road was blocked off and we had to go a different direction. NY traffic is bad enough without that. After an hour of getting no where our NY friend used her persuasive manner and got us through a closed street directly in front of the port. We arrived around 10:45am. On boarding was pretty smooth, I think we waited for an hour and half after we were dropped off, in line and waiting for our number 27 to be called and on board. Once on ship we explored a bit, our staterooms (13184/13182) were close to the splash academy so we registered our 3 and 4 year olds. The staff was very friendly and outgoing and got the boys super stoked about the activities planned that week. They were begging to go the rest of the time on ship and had a great time. We loved where our rooms were located, right next to the Forward Elevators and one floor above entrance to Splash Academy, central on the boat between buffet up a few floors and main activities down a few floors.

Our cabin attendant Willy was super nice however didn't seem to have a lot of attention to detail as our garbage can wasn't emptied when we arrived in one room and the mirror had an odd film on it with a noticeable smiley face someone had made on it. He came back later and cleaned it. The rooms had plenty of storage which was great! We shared two adjoining rooms and expected to have to store some of our kids things in the friend/nanny's cabin and we didn't have to. Under the couch drawers were great and our large suit cases fit under the bed just fine. One cabin was setup with the bed closest to the balcony, the other with the bed closest to the closet. My DW and I took the room with bed closest to the balcony and moved the bed even closer and were able to fit the pack and play between the couch and our bed and it was perfect! We did pack extra power strips as recommended and they came in handy for our devices. We didn't find the need to have a card in the slot for the lights to work to be a problem, we used other rewards cards we had that matched the same size as our room key and then just used the light switches to turn things off and on. We did wish we had brought a night light option, we ended up using an iphone flashlight app partially covered as a night light. Read more