Our family sailed on the Caribbean Princess and departed the Brooklyn, NY cruise terminal on 6/22/08, for a 9-day cruise of the Caribbean. The stops were as follows: Grand Turk, Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, and Bermuda. This is me and my wife's third cruise (first w/ our 3 children). Our first two prior cruises were w/ Celebrity where we also sailed the Caribbean. So we decided to give Princess a run.

Embarkation was not much of a problem, except for the traffic. We arrived at the Brooklyn Terminal at around 11:45am. Getting to the terminal is somewhat difficult as road construction caused detours, as one approached the pier. I found it difficult to navigate to the passenger drop-off/pick-up spot. Traffic control/direction was almost nonexistent as vehicles piled up while passengers and luggage were being dropped off. Embarkation was much smoother after we were unloaded. After going through immigrations and security, we were on the ship by 12:30pm. Our luggage arrived at our state room around 12:50pm—not too bad! We had the rest of the time to unpack, get something to eat, and explore the ship until the 5pm embarkation time.

We had two interior rooms on the Riviera deck near the center of the ship. The rooms were nicely appointed and clean and seemed about the same size as on the Celebrity ships as I remember. The bathroom shower was on the small side—slightly larger than telephone booth (oops, just dated myself!). My only gripe w/ the room was the temperature. It always felt borderline warm (77-79 deg. F). No matter how much we complained, nothing was done to cool the room to our liking. Our cabin steward was outstanding. The room was always clean w/ a freshly filled ice bucket and clean towels. Read more