Background - My wife and I are both in our early forties. This is our second cruise overall and our second cruise with Carnival. It was just the two of us as we left the kids at home with family.

I am career military(Navy). Just want to mention this early on but Carnival's military discount is incredible. We saved just almost 40% off of the initial rate. That said, Carnival does a good job of refunding your money if you buy early and the price goes down for that particular cabin so in the end we probably saved 20-25% of what the regular price is. Still saved us a bunch of money that we used on excursions, etc..

Hotel Info - We stayed at the Hotel Jazz in Barcelona for three days prior to embarkation and we stayed one day at the Hotel Soho after the cruise was over. We arrived three days early to give us plenty of time to get used to the time zone and in case our luggage got lost on the flight we would three days for it to catch up to us. Luckily that did not happen but there were 18 or so guests that did have their luggage lost. I think they tried to arrive the same day the cruise left which is certainly doable. Read more