This is a review from our 8 day cruise on Carnival Freedom on Oct. 24-Nov. 1 2009, to Cozumel, Costa Rica and Panama. If you like details there is a more detailed review on the boards that I wrote titled: 'Freedom Review -W. Caribbean - 8 day - Cozumel, Costa Rica, Panama' A little background on us.....there were 6 of us (3 couples). We are all in our mid 40's to mid-50's. It was me and my husband's, 5th cruise. Our best friends 2nd and one of them her fourth. We got pretty lucky on the weather on this cruise. It did rain on and off all week....but only for short periods and never when we were sunning or in the ports. Pre-cruise We arrived in FLL the day before and we stayed at Hyatt Place. The reason why we chose this hotel was because they offered a free breakfast and free shuttle to and from the airport/port. It's a nice hotel and convenient to nearby restaurants, like Outback, 5 Guys Burgers and Fries and also had a Total Wine nearby. The shuttle service was a disappointment, with us waiting about 1 hour and a half at the airport, and then not being able to fit us all in the morning, unless we wanted to wait another hour or so. We ended up taking a cab to the port.

Embarkation The following morning we checked out around 10:00, called for a cab and were at the port by 10:45am. Embarkation was a breeze and we were on board by 11:30am. We went to lunch at the lido deck and were allowed in our room at 1:30pm.

Cabin - 8448 We had an aft wrap around cabin- room 8448. WOW, what a deck!! Here is an estimate of the dimensions. Direct aft was about about 3 ft. Angle which, looked directly aft, as well, was about 25-30 ft long and the side deck was about 20 ft. long. The whole thing was about 3-4 ft wide. I was amazed at the size. The cabin itself was your average size cabin with no couch. Plenty of room to put your clothes away. 3 closets, and in one of them 2 robes. There was a blow dryer in the drawer which is already connected to an electrical outlet and there was only 1 plug in the whole cabin, that we could find.....CC posters were right when they said to bring an extension cord or a power strip.....we didn't, and every so often I needed to plug in my curling iron, while DH, was trying to recharge the camera battery. The bathroom had plenty of small shelves to put your toiletries on. The shower was small, but we also had a problem with the drainage....well we thought it was the drainage inside the stall, it was outside.....there was a little drain hole near the shower, behind the toilet, where the water would come out when you showered...the first couple of times we showered there was like a ¼ inch of water in the back half of the bathroom, we told the room steward because we thought it was coming out of the shower. I guess they sent maintenance, (we told him on our way to dinner) but the problem kept reoccurring......we FINALLY figured out after about 3 days, not to have the shower water on full power. Come to find out several people had this same problem, so if it happens to you, you know what to do...don't have the shower on full power! As far as noise in the aft cabin. Yes, we did hear some chair scrapping from the lido deck, every now and then....but not enough to annoy us. There was vibration when we pulled into ports. We were always up so we didn't notice it until we pulled back in to FLL....we pulled in around 5:30am and we really noticed it then. People have complained of soot in the aft cabins...didn't really notice any....although on the rails if you sat just right, you could see something on them, when I wiped my fingers through it, my fingers came up clean...not sure if it was soot or what. We had a nice breeze the further to the side we went, but if you have a true aft, I think it would be to hot back there during the day, especially for a Caribbean Cruise....Alaska, it may be great!! Another good thing about a wrap aft is that you can see where you are going, as opposed to a true aft where you can only see what you have just passed. (We will be on a true aft in Alaska in May so we will see the difference.) Read more