We just got off the Miracle this morning in NYC and we had a fantastic cruise!!! First, I want to thank everyone from cruise critic! I got so many great tips that really helped us to have a great time on our cruise!!! We are a family of four. DH and I are 47 years old and our daughters are 16 and 20. I had cruised twice before 20 yrs ago and DH and DD's had never cruised before.

Embarkation: We hired a van to take us from our home in NJ to the port in NYC. We left at 10:45am and arrived at the port about 11:30am. Since we knew there was a triathlon in NYC that day, we asked the driver to take us through the Lincoln Tunnel and it was smooth and easy.

We had put our Carnival luggage tags on all our bags and dropped them off. We went into the terminal to wait in line and waited for a while and finally got on the ship 1:15. The ship was a couple hours late getting into port due to some bad weather, so the previous cruisers got off later than usual. Read more