This was the first cruise for my husband & me, who are both in out late 20's. We drove to New Orleans the previous day. Embarkation was easy, we arrived at the terminal about 12:30 and were on the ship by 2:00. We dropped our luggage off with the porters and then drove and parked in the garage across the street (Fulton St. Garage, I think) because they were advertising $10/day parking instead of the $14 at the cruise terminal. There was a free shuttle from the garage to the terminal which was also waiting for us when we arrived back in N.O. Lines in the terminal were long, but moved quickly.

Once on the ship, we checked out our room and left a note for our cabin steward to please fill up our collapsible cooler with ice. When we arrived back in the cabin later that afternoon, he had provided us with a larger, hard-sided cooler filled with ice & kept it full the whole trip! We made our way up to the upper decks to watch sail away down the river.

Food: We ate dinner in the dining room every night during the late seating except for one night when we ate at Windows on the World. Our waitress, Joan, was excellent and remembered everyone's names every night! The food was excellent, although I wouldn't consider it phenomenal. I had the warm chocolate melting cake twice, hubby had it once and it was different every time, ranging from gooey on the inside to a brownie consistency. I also went to the midnight buffet to take pictures (don't miss this!) and brought some goodies back to the room. We ate lunch at the sandwich bar, pizza bar, lido buffet & windows on the world buffet. We had breakfast twice at the lido buffet, once in the dining room, and had room service once. Dining room was the best, but lido buffet was adequate and had a lot of choices. The best part about the food was all the choices, if you didn't like something, just get something else! Read more