This was our first cruise on NCL. My wife and I have previously sailed throughout the Caribbean on most of the other mid-price lines.

Departure was on Sunday at 8:00 PM out of Miami. We drove to the port from our home on Florida's West coast. The port arrival was a bit confusing due to parking lot and terminal construction. We arrived during peak boarding time at about 2:30 PM and had to wait in line for about 45 minutes to check in. After that things started looking up. First, we had booked an outside stateroom on deck four but a guaranteed reservation resulted in an upgrade to a cabin on deck eight. Then shortly after arriving on the ship I signed up for Internet service (.75 cents a minute without a bulk purchase plan). DW suggested we enter our cabin in the "500 minute free internet access" drawing... and when we got up on Monday morning we found out that I had won!

Note: 500 minutes is a large amount of internet service; even with routine use, doing a Firefox update, a couple of Windows security updates and sending multiple megabytes of pictures I only used about 200 minutes. For those who are technically inclined it was interesting to see that the average download speed was almost 80 kb/s, about twice as fast as a typical dial-up connection. Not bad for service from the middle of the Caribbean! Read more