My husband and I cruised on the 3/20/04 sailing of the Diamond Princess to the Mexican Riviera. This cruise was to celebrate our 15th anniversary. Since I am a college professor, we scheduled it during my spring break. I consulted lots of reviews in order to figure out what to expect - so now I am writing my own review in hopes of helping out those of you who are new to cruising or trying to decide on a cruise ship/line/itinerary. We sailed with just the two of us, leaving our three kids (3, 5, and 8) at home with their grandparents, so we were pretty much guaranteed to enjoy the cruise experience no matter what happened! We have only cruised once before, 5 years ago on Celebrity, so this review will be primarily a description of our experience rather than a comparison with other ships or lines. This is rather long, but I hope it will be helpful to you lucky future cruise planners!

Getting to LA

We live in Grand Rapids, MI and decided to fly out to Los Angeles the day before. I booked this cruise about 11 months in advance and we used frequent flyer miles to book our flights on United. Our flight out on Friday demonstrated that you never know what will happen when you're flying! Our flight out of GR to O'Hare was supposed to leave at 4:00 pm. We boarded about a ½ hour late, then sat on the runway for another ½ hour due to congestion in Chicago. Already we knew we had missed our connecting flight to LA. Believe it or not, after taking off and flying for about ½ hour, the pilot announced that we were going to have to return to Grand Rapids because there wasn't a slot for us to land in Chicago and we did not have enough fuel to circle the airport. So, we ended up back where we started - the airline left us sitting on the plane while they decided what they were going to do with us. Eventually our plane did take off again and we actually landed at O'Hare (only 3 hours later than we should have!). Because of spring break, the first flight out of O'Hare that United could re-book us on was at 10:00 am Saturday morning. Needless to say, we were not excited about spending the night in Chicago (especially since we had hotel reservations in LA). We ended up going standby on the last flight to LA that night! We were so relieved to get on that plane! Read more