Unlike most people my husband and I started planning for retirement in 1964 when we got married. After our first cruise in 1975 we knew this was something we wanted to do again. From that time until we retired, we were on 15 cruises, mostly on Royal Caribbean. Because of our early planning, we were able to retire early and have been retired for 7 years. Since we retired we have been on 25 cruises. We really like the longer cruises. More than half of our cruises have been longer than 7 days. Our longest cruises have been 30 nights from LA, through the Panama canal, down into the Amazon River to Manaus and up to Tampa, and 33 nights from LA to Sidney, Australia with stops in Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and several other islands. We enjoy everything about cruising. We sent our kids on a cruise for their honeymoons. We took our granddaughters on a cruise 4 years ago and are taking them again in May for a graduation and will do the same next year for the same reason.

We live in the LA area and had some points to use so we decided to cruise on the Carnival Paradise. The best service we got was at embarkation because we are gold card holders, so check in was a breeze for us. We usually book balconies but we had only enough points for an ocean view cabin. Be sure to print out your FUN PASS. We got to our cabin to drop off our carry on luggage and went to lunch before most of the people even got on the ship.

The Paradise is the oldest ship we have been on in quite a while. The ship was not easy to navigate because it had a dining room in the middle. You had to go up or down to get from one end to the other when you were on that deck. The public areas were very nice. The cabin accommodations were OK except for the fact that the cabin had no heat. Our table mates also had no heat in their cabins. Our cabin attendant had the air cranked all the way up the first night and luckily we went to the cabin after dinner. We found him and he turned the air off for us. When we asked how to set the heat, he said there is no heat. We told him no more air and he forgot only once. Another problem we had was cigarette smoke coming into our cabin. The cabin attendant said the people across the hall from us were heavy smokers and there was nothing he could do to help us. For the most part he was good, as were most of the staff on the ship. Read more