The voyage on "Explorer of the Seas" from Jan 13th to 25th was the first time cruise for my girlfriend, 28, and me, 33. Usually for vacations we fly to warm and sunny destinations, where we stay at a mid-priced hotel on a good beach and rent a car to go around and explore. This time we couldn't single out one beach and decided to try a cruise so that we could visit different beaches on several islands. We chose this particular trip because we wanted to avoid paying air fare and we wanted a two-week vacation. We also wanted to sail on a very large ship, because we thought it might swing less so there'd be less chance of getting seasick. We found out that the latter wasn't true soon enough: actually we were surprised at how bad the ship shook and rocked. We took Bonine whenever the ride started to get bumpy and it worked: we felt great the whole trip.

We arrived in Cape Liberty at around 11:30 and it did take our car around 30 minutes to crawl from port gates to the boarding area. We left our luggage with a handler, exchanged our paper Sea Pass from Online Check-In for real Sea Passes, which were card-keys to our stateroom, boarded the shuttle bus and came onboard quickly, where we first headed to Windjammer cafe for lunch. The menu, which was representative of all our subsequent lunches, offered a lot of choices. There were burgers, hot dogs and pizza, hot entrees and sides, including Asian foods, salads, fresh fruit and desserts. The beverages offered were water, lemonade, iced tea, hot tea and coffee; anything else cost extra. Bottled water was offered at $3.50 for a 1 Liter serving.

By 1:00 our stateroom was ready. It felt cramped, so during our stay the two of us were often in each other's way and bumped into each other. The furnishings were inexpensive, old and worn, like a display of second hand IKEA merchandise. However Joel, our friendly Stateroom Attendant, did a great job of keeping the stateroom clean and neat; we were very happy with his service. Read more