This was a trip (March 11-19) to spend time with the wife and 4-year old daughter. We did a similar cruise down the Mexican Coast on NCL about a year and half ago - although there were no ports in common. Since we have only been on the two cruises, I can only compare this with the one other trip.

Embarkation at San Diego. Since there is no on-site parking at the San Diego cruise terminal, we used a parking lot about a mile away and caught the courtesy shuttle to the terminal. A Holland ship was also embarking at the same time, so things were a bit crowded. A computer system failure also slowed the process, so from the time we parked until we were in our stateroom took a couple of hours. [The Long Beach experience on NCL was much smoother.]

The stateroom. We had a balcony room aft (4259) with a great view. This room was supposedly an upgrade over a standard balcony room, with an extra 2 feet of depth, but I would avoid this type of room in the future for two reasons: 1) the noise of the impelled water as it reaches the surface is too loud to want to hang out on the balcony, and 2) the ride was much choppier than in midship. This latter issue was only really a factor on the final two days when the waves were higher. This was not a major issue - just a little more uncomfortable. Our steward, Elviro, was great - very attentive and provided great service. Read more