My wife and I were on the 12-night Southern Caribbean cruise 2/27/11-3/11/11. We enjoyed sailing out of Cape Liberty as we were able to drive down the day before and see a show on Broadway Saturday night and then set sail on Sunday. We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Staten Island which was a great hotel with free parking and a free shuttle to/from the port. We had reservations on the 11AM shuttle and yes, there was some traffic on the port road but we expected that and didn't really care too much because we weren't driving. By 12:30PM we were getting on the bus to head over to the ship so we didn't think that was too bad at all.

Our ports were Labadee, Samana, DR, St. Thomas, St. Kitts, St. Johns, Antigua and St. Maarten. Labadee was totally different than our last visit back in 2006 and is now a beautiful place with many excursions or just a great beach day. Samana was awesome. We did an ATV through Terry which was amazing. Yes, we drove through some very poor towns but the scenery was beautiful. We also visited a very pristine beach and a nice waterfall. St. Thomas is usually our shopping port and did not disappoint. We rented a moped/scooter in St. Kitts and I would highly recommend that as we had a blast. In Antigua we missed the bus for our Kayak tour so we ended up booking the zipline tour through the ship and I was very disappointed with that (if you've never done a zipline it would just be ok, if you've done another zipline course you will probably be bored, annoyed and disappointed). In St. Maarten we shared a Jeep rental with another couple which wasn't as expensive as I thought it was going to be and we visited Marigot and Maho Beach and loved them both.

Our room steward, waiter and assistant waiter were all Superb and we even had a nice amount of interaction with the head waiter this time which was nice. It's true what they say, the crew on the Explorer is great in general with more than a few who are even better. We ran into some very helpful crew at Guest Relations. All of the photographers are great, but props to Celeste and James who were great fun and took some of our favorite pictures. Read more