This sailing was my second cruise. I went with a friend from college, and we were both excited to see Mexico. Overall, I was generally pleased with the sailing, and the way that Norwegian handled some hiccups along the way.

The original itinerary had us sailing out of San Pedro on the 9th, spending the 10th and 11th at sea, spending the 12th, 13th, and 14th in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas respectively, spending one more day at sea on the 15th, and finally arriving back in San Pedro early on the 16th. A little over a week from sailing, we were informed by Norwegian that the ship would overnight in Puerto Vallarta and skip Mazatlan so they could take care of some maintenance. This maintenance ended up taking longer than NCL anticipated, so we left Puerto Vallarta almost 12 hours behind schedule and had to skip Cabo San Lucas entirely. So, the final tally was two port days (both in the same port) and four sea days.

Embarkation was painless. NCL has you pick an embarkation time during online registration, which seems to avoid big lines at the check-in counter. We walked right up to a counter when we got there, and even when the line got a little bigger later in the day, it never seemed to be more than a few minutes. We boarded around noon, and our stateroom was ready at around 1:30, just as we were finishing lunch. Debarkation took a little longer, but I'd say we were off the boat and waiting for a cab within half an hour of leaving our stateroom. The crewmembers handling this process seemed to have everything under control. Read more