This Cruise was a gift to my mother (60's) who has seen many of her friends become Cruise devotees. I'm in my 30's and was looking for a low key relaxing break from work. My typical vacations prior to this were much more active, self-planned, off the beaten track holidays.
We flew to Fort Lauderdale early Sunday morning, and despite an hour delay in arriving made it to Port Everglades around 11:30. We were assigned group 5 and encountered our first problem. Security refused to left us bring our larger suitcase into the embarkation area advising it was too big and would need to go through the porters. We repeatedly told them we wanted to keep the bag with us to no avail. The bag was given to the porters, and then when we entered the waiting area we saw many other people with the same size luggage who'd had no problems bringing them through security. I approached security again, to be told 1) If you arrive when the porters are still busy with the debarking passengers any size case can come through because they won't force you to leave your luggage unattended, and 2) had we told them there were medical devices in the case it could have come through security with us! Security had told us repeatedly there no discretion...this was clearly wrong. They tried to retrieve our bag from the porters but it was already on the ship. Otherwise embarkation was flawless...fast, efficient, and we were in our room in less than 30 minutes.
The first two days were sea days. We spent these checking out the amenities and the food. Apart from the first lunch (Sail-Away day) we never had any problem with the buffet and always sat next to the window. Apart from the Mexican buffet we found the food at the buffet was very good and some of the deserts were excellent. The food was fresh, replaced frequently, and they did an outstanding job keeping the buffet clean. The first lunch clearly taxed the limits of how many people the buffet could serve at ounce and it was chaotic. But I imagine most of the 3000 people on board were all trying to eat at once!