Background:
With more than 40 cruises under my belt, I thought I had experienced the total gamut of service, cuisine and accommodations, but our recent Garden Villa experience on the Norwegian Dawn was truly incomparable to anything I've ever even dreamed of.
Cruising with my parents beginning in the 1960s, our first accommodations (for many years) were interior cabins or exterior rooms too low in the bowels of the ship to offer a porthole. The staterooms had plenty of floor space, but had painted iron twin beds anchored to the floors with ever-present bunks and absolutely no decor of any kind. There were no televisions in these cabins, and no bow camera to allow us to gauge the outside weather or time of day. My folks eventually decided to spring for an outside cabin with a single porthole and we were finally able to determine if the sun was shining and whether to dress for the pool or the movie theater, the only option on a rainy day.