I'm going to be as fair and honest in this review as I can. I sailed on this ship last year at the same time, so there is going to be some compare and contrast...some good and some bad.

Travel to Miami: This has nothing to do with NCL, but I'll put it in in order to show the importance of leaving a day early. Leaving from O'hare took longer than we thought. Our flight was at 4:00 pm. We didn't get off the ground until 8:30 pm. They were still playing catch up from the 600+ flight cancellations from the day before. People that were supposed to be in Miami at 1:30p.m didn't leave O'hare until 4:30p.m. Once we arrived in Miami, my watching "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" every Thanksgiving paid off. Instead of going to the luggage carousel, I went to the hotel phone bank to make sure we still had a place to stay. Good thing I did as our reservation got moved over to the hotel next door. I had no idea. Had I not checked, we would have paid for a cab to go to the booked hotel (the shuttle quits at 11:00 pm) and found this out. Because I checked, I found that the new hotel was still running a shuttle. The room was fine, but it was too late to go for a swim, so we went to bed. It was quite a change going from the snow and ice in Illinois to Summer.

Embarkation: Getting on was easy. The port was under construction last year. This time it was mostly done and looked much nicer. We jumped through all the hoops, swore neither one of us threw up or had the chunder in the last two days and got aboard. Read more