My wife and I were on our fifth cruise, the second cruise for the couple that we were traveling with. They had friends in Miami that were willing to drive us from the Hotel to the airport, so we saved on transportation costs. We arrived in Ft Lauderdale the day before as we live on the West Coast and same day traveling was near impossible. The wife wanted to arrived in plenty of time anyway, as we nearly missed the ship on our first cruise, so she never wanted to go through that again. We stayed the night in the Doubletree Inn and went on to Miami the next day. It's hard to schedule two couples on a cruise because opinions vary but to my surprise, we were able to agree on things and go along famously. We had traveled twice before on NCL so we took the latitudes line to save time. To my surprise there was next to nobody in line so we had to wait only for a few minutes before the other couple was able to follow. Once we arrived onboard, we were a little early but we went to look at our rooms anyway. The stewards allowed us to put our carry-ons in the room even though they had not yet finished cleaning them, so we did not have to lug them around the ship. After that we went down to the Indigo as we had done our homework and knew from fellow Cruise Critic members that the restaurant was open. Had a nice lunch there and started exploring the ship. The ship was huge! The main lobby with it's two story wii screen and all the food venue's, bowling alley and all. We spent about an hour and a half acquainting ourselves with the ship. The most important thing that we found out to prevent us from getting lost was that the fish on the carpeting in the hallways always swim forward. As our rooms were all the way forward on deck 8, this was very helpful. We made reservations for the next two nights at this time. It was a little annoying having to make reservations all of the time, but only slightly. We had used freestyle before and it works for us. One thing that we did notice right away is that the pool area was always crowded. The wife and I are not much for sun bathing, and that was a good thing because there was usually not a place to sit down. We were going to keep tabs on the other couple by using cell phones. When I found out that my subscriber charges $2.50 a minute roaming fee in the Caribbean, this idea was scrapped.

Cabin

It was small but had good storage. The thing I have to complain about was the bathroom. I'm six foot four and did not have leg room to sit forward on the toilet. I had to sit side saddle to do my business. Read more