My wife and I along with another couple booked this cruise last year due to some great deals and incentives at the time. Never having sailed out of Galveston or ever been to Texas, we thought it would be fun to try. Arriving three days early, we were able to see San Antonio and then drove to Houston staying in the Clear Lake area for two nights. We all agreed the best part of Texas was the people (yall) and the worst would be the traffic. Using Lighthouse parking for our rental car, we arrived at the terminal around 11am only to find that a medical emergency had shut it down, leaving the crowd to build up until they opened doors making a large mob for security screening. It took us about an hour to get through that, then easily on board around noonish. The ship is truly stunning to see, our friend was able to ride the flowrider early while there were no crowds and he enjoyed it. The buffet was quite crowded and the one feature we did not like about the ship was having no outside areas either serving food or drinks and nowhere to sit outside and eat a meal. One had to go all the way into the back of the ship to get food or iced drinks, and for sanitary reasons they were handling all drinks by staff, so you could not just go up and dispense your own ice or drinks, but grab a filled glass and pour it into your own thermal mug in our case. The food in the buffet was fine with good variety, however at peak times getting a table would be frustrating.

Our cabins were on deck seven just aft of the hump superior balconies, nice and large enough but the design of the closet next to the bathroom door caused issues for us. One day the water pressure was lost entirely while my wife was showering, a call to maintainence told us they were working on a fix, and a few minutes later it came back. The same day the desalinization system went down and they were trying to serve this salty water to crew and guest alike. We ate at Chops that night and they served us this awful water, we could not drink it, so they comped us Evian as they should, however they were obviously trying to keep it hush hush, leaving the guest to speak of it on our own. I found out the next day from our waiter at dinner the entire ship was affected, my only thought is to RCI please be honest with us and tell us. The next day it tasted fine. Our service and food in the dining room was exceptional, and we enjoyed our time with Leonardo and Rommel much. The sailing was rough seas the first day and then the weather was fantastic other than that pesky hurricane Patricia the really messed with our debarkation and drive back to the airport. All in all it was a great cruise for us all. I've read other complain about the coffee however they do serve Seattles Best and it is drip coffee makers both in the Windjammer and Promenade Cafe, we thought it was very good, except the night the water went salty at which time they tried to serve us the coffee and it was undrinkable. One other strange thing we all noticed was the lack of bar servers the first half of the trip. Nowhere at any pool or even in a bar/lounge would you see any bar service, we'd have to walk to the bar and get it ourselves. We thought this was really weird given the profit on alcohol and built in customers.