My family and I (My husband, children 5 and 11) and my parents took this cruise primarily because it was out of Charleston and that is only 2 hours away from home. We had a great time as a family and there were a lot of positives about the trip. I'll begin with the positives first.

Our cabin on the Empress Deck was always kept clean by Eddie our steward. He did a great job picking up after the 4 of us in this very small cabin. We had the bed that pulled down from the wall and a rollaway and the queen bed. Needless to say we were wall to wall beds as we opted to keep the rollaway up the entire week rather than them taking it up and down every day and night. It worked out okay but when we were all in the cabin at the same time it was quite a circus in there. We were climbing over each other and the beds. I did like the amount of closet space we had - it worked perfectly for us.

Being on the Empress Deck (Forward) and my parents were mid ship on Empress my children were able to go back and forth between our cabins with no problems and we were able to watch them all the way. Read more