My name is Tenisha and I was traveling with my best friend and her three children, ages 13, 11 and 6 months. I booked this cruise onboard the Monarch in September 2006. This was my fifth cruise (Platinum!!) and my first cruise on a Voyager class ship.

We caught a red eye from Sfo to Mia Friday and landed around 4:45am Saturday morning. The flight was pretty ordinary except for the cat meowing through the entire flight. Seriously. For a while, I thought I was hearing things and that OCD had finally cracked my brain. Once we landed in Miami, we went to pick up our bags. That was our first adventure. Finding the baggage claim area took a good 20 minutes or so. We asked for assistance from airport employees to find baggage claim area and we told to go in three different directions. So once we found our luggage we headed out to ground transportation and caught a taxi to the hotel. The taxi was our second adventure. Five minutes after leaving the airport, the taxi started making this grinding noise and smoking. The driver didn't seem to notice, but we were worried. We breathed a huge sigh of relief once we reached our hotel.

Hotel: We were staying at the Holiday Inn Port of Miami Downtown. The first thing I noticed was Bayside Marketplace. The second thing I noticed was the strong smell of urine. We noticed there were homeless people in the area and I felt that we are very fortunate to be able to take vacations like this when there are so many who do not have that ability. We arrived at the hotel @ 6:30 am and were able to check in early (normal check in is @ 3:00pm) with no extra charge. As there is no bellman service that early, they gave us a luggage cart and we took our luggage to our room. The hotel is very clean and neat once you get inside. The room was clean and spacious enough for two adults and three children (ages 13, 11, & 6 months) We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet, which was pretty good. They had a nice variety of items like the standard bacon, eggs, potatoes, Danish, toast. But they also had fruit salad, cereal and different juices. Checkout was pandemonium. It seemed as if everyone checking out Sunday morning was going on a cruise. It took 15 minutes to get an elevator. Every elevator was packed and sometimes with the same people. I saw one party at least four times. Because there were groups on every floor pushing buttons, they couldn't get down to the lobby. Once we got down to the lobby actual checkout was breeze. We paid in cash when we got there and didn't charge anything to the room. We got a taxi and we were off to the Explorer. Read more