This was a cruise we picked for our 30th anniversary. My wife wanted to see a volcano, I wanted to experience a longer cruise and we both wanted to see Hawaii. It was a perfect cruise for us!
For background, we are fairly recent cruisers with our first cruise being on the Monarch for our 25th anniversary. This Hawaiian cruise was our 8th cruise, all being with RCI except one with Disney. For this cruise, we spent 4 nights at a resort on Oahu and took a cab to the port. Embarkation was fairly easy but the wait was longer than on our previous cruises, but not an unrealistic one. It was a little hap-hazard in how the lines would snake but the staff was friendly and everyone was in a pre-cruise euphoria. I’ll say that the cruise terminal was large, not that modern and no-thrills.
Once on board, we went to our cabin and dropped off our luggage. We had cabin # 7658 which was a balcony cabin located in the aft quarter on the starboard side. The first thing that hit us was a sewage smell in the hallway to our room, which put us in a foul mood (we experienced this on Enchantment before as well). Once inside, the cabin didn’t feel as large as what we had on Freedom or Oasis but was probably larger than Enchantment. The balcony was funny. It was a double-deep balcony, being about 6’ deep. However, only about 3’ of it had a divider between our neighbors’ balconies, so any of our cruise mates could easily peak into our room. That we didn’t like at all. Also, this was an older ship and our balcony had parts of rusted metal visible and beat-up flooring. Our cabin did have lots of storage, which was a pleasant surprise. We found the bed to be very hard, the pillows flat and the refrigerator didn’t seem to work. The room was clean though and didn’t have that bad smell that was in the hallway.
I really don't know what category of cabin we had, except it had an extended balcony. As I mentioned, the openness of this longer balcony was strange. There was a missing tile piece on the bathroom floor, the refrigerator was broken and the bed was very hard. However, the amount of storage space was surprising. The room was very clean and our attendant was great.