My wife, two kids (13,15), and I recently returned from our 7 day Mexican Riviera cruise on the Carnival Splendor. This week-long voyage concluded a two week speed vacation that included 3 days at Disneyland/California Adventure Park, visiting relatives in the San Joaquin valley and Santa Cruz, and a quick stop at our second favorite city in the world, San Francisco. This was our second cruise with Carnival. We also cruised the Hawaiian Islands with NCL three years ago.

Embarkation. I dropped the wife and kids off at the terminal at about 11:00am and quickly raced back to Avis to return our rental vehicle. I was gone about 10-15 minutes and when I returned the family had deposited all of our luggage with the porters and was wondering what took me so long. We joined the pre-boarding line and in about 10 minutes received our sail and sign cards and our zone number. We sat around the terminal area for about 20 minutes and the zones soon began to move. Within 10-15 minutes we found ourselves entering the doors into the main lobby. 3600 passengers and 1200 kids onboard? Don't believe this for a minute. The most I saw was a couple hundred or so. I still can't figure out how Carnival manages this many people on embarkation or on the entire ship for that matter. In the main lobby we immediately noticed the pink decor and it was ingrained into our memory for the next 30 seconds. We hustled up to the Lido deck while the crew prepared our cabins and had a tasty lunch on the aft section. The wife and kids dined on Indian food and I had a hot pastrami on rye. Drinks of the day were soon procured through our DOD cards and while I cannot recommend all of the fruity concoctions we did find the blue margaritas to our liking and ordered only those thereafter.

Cabins: At 2:00pm we headed to the Empress deck to check out our digs. Everything was spotless and ready for us to move in. I had preordered a dozen roses and a wine and cheese basket. The roses were there, but the wine and cheese didn't show up until about 4:00pm. Even though I was technically registered in the interior cabin across the hall with my 15yr old son, our steward, Roel figured out the arrangement and my wife and I had a nice double bed set up in the balcony cabin and our kids had two twins in the interior. The cabins were certainly adequate in size as were the heads. While the beds are of very high caliber, we had spent the last week in 4 different Hiltons and they take the prize for best place to lay your weary bones. Read more