For our 20th Anniversary, my wife and I decided to take our first cruise. We first thought of the idea in November of 2011 but did not take any action until January of 2012. We knew nothing about cruises so we searched through various cruise forums including cruisecritic.com to gather information. Then we decided on Royal Caribbean over Carnival because of the latter's reputation as a "party" cruise line. We chose to sail on Freedom of the Seas and their Eastern Caribbean tour over Oasis of the Seas because we were concerned about the larger number of passengers on the Oasis. We received offers from various internet travel agencies and chose one who we hoped would meet our needs (they did). We made a $500 deposit on the cruise through our agent on January 21st. We had to have the whole cruise paid off seven weeks later on March 6th for our May 20th sail date which made things a bit tight. Our agent actually gave us a three day extension to March 9th which we used to make the final payment. However, we were unable to purchase Royal Caribbean insurance because we missed the deadline. We later purchased cruise insurance a week before we sailed through another agency. You don't need insurance but we felt we had too much invested not to have our investment protected. Our agent arranged our flights through ChoiceAir and so we flew from Columbus Ohio to Atlanta and then to Orlando. From Orlando we used a shuttle service we found online which picked us up at the airport and took us to the hotel I booked in Cocoa Beach. I wanted to get there the day before we set sail in case there were any glitches. We paid the hotel $6 each to use their shuttle service the next morning to drive us to the dock.

What to bring

We bought two hard-shell pieces of luggage to protect our breakables and souvenirs. Our luggage had TSA friendly locks and as it turned out they did search our checked-in luggage because they left pamphlets inside stating they had done so. I understand TSA will break your locks if they feel they have to. We also had two carry-on pieces (I saw a suggestion to bring duct tape for various reasons. We didn't but wish we had when one of our older carry-ons ripped. The ship gave us some tape and so we repaired it) Suntan or sun screen. I got a nice face burn on Coco Cay. Put swim trunks and change of clothing or two in the carry-on. We met a lady on ship whose luggage got lost at O'Hare airport and didn't have any other clothes until she bought some at one of the islands. I brought my suit and wore it for both formal nights in the Main Dining room. Of course you never have to eat in the MDR if you don't want to. The Windjammer offers free buffets morning, noon, and night and there are other paid restaurants on the ship. My wife brought an iPod dock for music in our room and on the balcony. The closet contains plenty of hangers and a small safe. We brought a laptop and just kept it in one of the suitcases as it wouldn't fit inside the safe. But I never felt theft would be a problem as many others stated that they just leave their laptops on the desk in the room. I brought a nice digital camera and a $70 underwater camera that took photos and videos. The underwater camera came in handy when we Jet Skied and swam at the beach. (I took about 500 photos and videos combined). I also bought an underwater watch for $30 and wore it the whole time. You need to keep it on ship's time so you know when the ship is departing from a port. The ship used Eastern Standard Time. I brought my iPhone but never turned it on except at the U.S. Virgin Islands so as to not incur any extravagant roaming charges. I also wore T-shirts that I purchased at each port so my wardrobe increased during the cruise. Anything you buy has to be packed on the trip home so leave some room. My wife had to repack our suitcases at the airport so as to not incur an overweight bag charge. Read more