We booked this cruise to celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary on Valentine's Day. We had sailed on the Grand in the fall doing 4 B2B cruises in the Med so it was almost like coming home when we boarded! It was great to see and catch up with so many of the crew that we had come to know during our fall cruises.

Embarkation We typically stay a bit north of Ft Lauderdale (much more reasonably priced hotels), drive down on sail day and leave our car at Air and Sea parking. Their van dropped us off at the terminal around 1 pm and it was right through security and check in and we were in our cabin in record time. So 1 pm or later will become our target time to arrive in the future!

Our Cabin We had booked a guarantee and were pleasantly surprised to find our cabin had been upgraded 3 days before sailing. We ended up in C102 - the first cabin forward on the port side on Caribe deck. We love Caribe balconies since they are so much larger than other balconies and have booked them specifically for many cruises in the past. Although we were a bit concerned that being so far forward might get us rocking and rolling in rough seas we never encountered rough enough seas to really feel uncomfortable. But we did find we were too far away for a lasting Wi-Fi signal in our room. The Internet guy said he would look into it and get back to us but never did (typical lack of response and follow through on this ship). But I remembered a post on CC where someone suggested keeping your door open to improve the signal so I did that - worked enough for a fair signal but did compromise privacy a little. A problem associated with the late upgrade was the number of departments onboard that did not get the message that our cabin had changed. As a result our flowers were delivered to the wrong cabin, our minibar was not set up, the cabin was set up for some first time on Princess honeymooners who were upgraded to a mini-suite (and we kept getting their mail and phone messages for the rest of the cruise), vouchers from our TA went missing, and somehow our onboard credits were not applied. So we spent the first 5 days trying to get the important things straightened out. Read more