My wife and I left the kids behind this time for a low-key relaxing cruise for two. We flew into Houston Hobby airport the night before, rented a car and stayed near NASA not quite half way to Galveston. We like to avoid lines, so we arrived at the port at around 2:00. There were still pretty long lines but we later found that there had been a computer problem that had held things up.

Upon boarding, we found the ship to be much more tastefully decorated than some other Carnival ships that we have cruised on in the past. Our stateroom was a little dated, but had a great balcony on the back of the ship. I'm still not sure who our cabin steward was. I introduced myself to one person who was around quite a bit and he was very friendly, especially when he realized that I remembered his name. But, there was another steward around who may have been assigned to us - just not sure as neither of them told us. We were wiped out on our first night and wanted to get to bed a little early around 11 p.m. At that point we realized that our room was located over Club Rio, the karaoke bar and things were just kicking into high gear down there. This wasn't muffled noise - we could literally sing along in our room as our floor vibrated and thumped underneath us. Needless to say, we had a discussion with guest services who assured us that was the only karaoke night in Club Rio. Technically, they were right, but a band-accompanied almost-karaoke was hosted most other nights. Since we hadn't slept the night before, we decided to take an afternoon nap. That's when band rehearsal started. We heard the entire country show word for word, so maybe the upside is that we didn't have to actually attend the show later in the evening. After speaking with guest services, they offered us another room on a different floor with a smaller balcony. By this time, we had adapted our schedules to the sounds below and didn't want to pack up/unpack again and give up our larger balcony. The guest services people were very accommodating and called to check on us regularly, even giving us a discount on our room at the end of the cruise. I have listed our cabin number in this review and took a shot at cabin class although I was guessing a little on that. Buyer beware if you book over Club Rio, unless you stay up very late anyway. Don't let your travel agent upsell you on that like ours did.

The ship's deckplan is a little awkward in that it is very difficult to traverse the ship on one floor. We often would attempt to move across the ship only to find that we had to go up or down and then across and back up or down. Naturally, we got the hang of this with only a couple of days left on the ship. We liked the pool area with the large tv screen and graduated seating that made it easy to view the screen despite large numbers of people milling around. Read more