Family of 4; two daughters (14 and 6) and DH and I (we are 37). This our 7th cruise, our 3rd on NCL. Dawn, Pride of America and Star....other lines include Disney, HAL and Carnival. This is our 1st time cruising NCL without a Penthouse/butler cabin. This is our background with cruising. We take about 3 vacations a year and cruise about every other year.

We flew into LAX on Friday, used Exeucar (dept of Super Shuttle) with meet and greet service which I highly recommend. I priced out a taxi, a shuttle and private car service for a family 4 - it really wasn't much more money. We stayed at the Westin in Long Beach. It was nice and we could see the ocean from our room. We walked to an Albertsons in the morning to buy juices for our bar set up. I had arranged two bottles of Vodka through the ship's group coordinator. We decided to go to the pier early in the event a higher category might have opened up. We were booked in an AF mini suite as we booked too late and all other categories for four were booked. We arrived to the pier around noon - we took a taxi from the hotel. The Latitudes line was bare, so we zipped right up to the check in computers and were seated to wait to board by 12:15. By 12:30, we were on the ship. Seamless for a sold out cruise. Based on recommendations here, we went to the main dining room for a sit down lunch. Very nice.

We registered our kids for their clubs; teen club for oldest and 6-9 for our youngest. I don't know if the 6-9 is always here, but her room was the Port Room at the front of the ship; a conference room. It wasn't ideal and to be honest, she didn't care for it very much. Imagine a conference room with the chairs pushed to the sides of the walls with some board games scattered on the floor. Not very exciting. Read more