We left Utah at 5:00am for the 10 hour drive to Long Beach. We made a stop in Las Vegas for lunch and hit the road again. We spent 2 day prior to the cruise in Long Beach at the Super 8. We got a good deal on the room. The Super 8 has it's good points and it not so good points. We paid $146 for both nights. We had a large room with 2 king beds. The motel is a little older. The good points are--the staff is wonderful, free breakfast, afternoon snacks with soda and wine, and a nice size pool with a really hot hot tub. The room we got, which was room 101 was under the lobby, so it was at little loud late into the night, the hotel is on a main room. We could here the cars when we were at the pool but didn't notice the noise from the cars in the room. Would I stay here again??? Yes. The price was right and the breakfast had a lot of choices and it was free. We spent one day in Long Beach at the Aquarium and Seaport Village.

Sunday we boarded the ship around 12:30pm we had zone 1. The ship is the largest boat we had been on. The layout is a little different than the two previous cruises on the fantasy class ship. The kids(ages 12 and 13) had it figured out on the first day. I was comfortable by day 3 but still had times when we did a lot of back tracking. We were in the golden pearl dining room on the bottom and you had to go up to go down to get the the entrance. Other than that it is fairly easy to get around.

Our cabin was a balcony cabin. We had cabin for 4, an upper, couch/bed and the king. It was not as cramped as I thought it would be. The best tip I got from the CC boards was the shoe organizer. I am a little bit of a neat freak and it really helped with every-one's stuff not being all over. Read more