I guess I will start from the very beginning:

Embarkation: A few days before the cruise, Carnival called my wife and me to tell us that they will begin boarding the ship between 2 and 4 and not to come until that time. We dicided to take our chances and arrive at 12:30PM. We got to the port and, as expected, they were already boarding guests. There was no line to check in and after check in, we had to wait about 5 minutes before our number was called to go through security to the ship. It was very easy to know where to go and the Carnival staff made check in a breeze, especially for a sold out New Year's cruise. We went through all of the security and customs stuff pretty quickly and got onto the ship. They told us the door would not open until 2PM to access the rooms, which was fine with us. We took the time to call people one last time before we shut our phones off. I also took advantage of the "soda sticker" for unlimited soda for the cruise. We just got one sticker and shared it between the two of us rather than paying double. We made the sticker worth the price every day.

Room: We stayed in an outside cabin for this cruise as the balcony rooms were too high and we didn't plan on staying in the room very much. The room was suprisingly spacious with a flat panel TV. We had a huge window and it had enough room where the two of us could sit in the window sill comfortably and look out. It was pretty neat. The bathroom was larger than usually as well and the two of us had plenty of room to manuever. Although we were on deck 2, it was not noise at all and not shaky either. Read more