This was the first cruise for my wife and I...we were celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. We were really looking forward to this, as we really haven't had an extended vacation to ourselves since we were married. For the most part the cruise did not disappoint. We arrived the day before on 12/9/2007 and stayed in the Clear Lake/NASA area as we visited the Space Center on Sunday afternoon. We were pretty disappointed when we woke up Monday morning, and I checked the webcam to see that the Conquest was still in port (what you could see of it...the fog was very thick and you could barely even see the ship on the camera). We wasted a little time in the morning before going down to Galveston around noon.

We went to the pier and had lunch at Fisherman's Wharf and watched and waited for the Conquest to leave. After it left we drove to EZ Cruise Parking where we had reserved parking for the week. We had to wait around there for a little bit before they took us to the pier, but we were still pretty early. We ended up going to Joe's Crab Shack for dinner before we got in line around 5:00. The line was VERY long. This was easily the worst part of the trip, but we realized that it wasn't Carnival's fault. All in all, we both thought they did a very good job of getting the ship turned around in a very short time. We did hear a few complainers...I'm not sure what they expected Carnival to do.

Once we got on the ship it was fantastic! We both thought the Ecstasy looked great! They had open seating for dinner on Monday night due to the late embarkation. We were on board around 7:30, and we sailed around 9:30. We were in the dining room when the captain came on to announce that we would be leaving...there was a very appreciative applause from everyone in the dining room. We found out from the captain at the cocktail party on Tuesday night that we beat the fog out of Galveston by about 15 minutes! Read more