My wife, son (age 13), and I went on the Independence of the Seas "Mediterranean Treasures" cruise, leaving Southampton on June 28 and returning on July 12. The ship stopped at Gibraltar, Barcelona, Villefranche (French Riviera), Livorno (Florence/Pisa), Cagliari, Malaga, Lisbon, and Vigo.

Pre-cruise: I opted to make travel and pre-cruise arrangements through RCCL. We flew from Washington Dulles to Heathrow without any problem, were met immediately by the RCCL rep, and bused to our hotel, which was the Grosvenor House. The hotel was nice and in a fabulous location (next to Hyde Park), but everything associated with it was hideously expensive. Since we arrived early in the morning, we got to camp out in the lobby for about 4 hours prior to getting into a room. We opted for free sightseeing (the British Museum and Hyde Park) on the day prior to embarkation.

Travel to Southampton: the harried RCCL rep, who was also trying to handle several busloads of passengers leaving for a Celebrity cruise out of Dover, got us onto the bus about 45 minutes late - just in time to hit the height of London weekend traffic. We drove through the middle of town to another hotel and stopped - no passengers. The driver finally rousted the handful of people we were supposed to pick up, and we then spent another 45 minutes in traffic going to another hotel to pick up maybe four people. It took over two hours to get out of London, and we didn't get to Southampton until around 2:00 p.m. Since we like to get on the ship early, this was fairly irritating. Read more