General info about us before beginning the review: Family of 6 (kids are 11, 9, 7 and 5) cruising for the first time together on Carnival, having cruised as a family before on Disney twice. Husband and I cruised on Carnival (same cruise!) 12 years ago and have also cruised with Norwegian.

Getting on the ship was a BREEZE. I highly recommend getting there later and avoiding the rush. We arrived at 1pm, walked through security and check-in, onto the ship and straight to our room. Our luggage was even at our room within the hour! We had just munched some late-lunch at the grill (definitely advise the grill over the buffet--I'll get to that later), walked back to the room and voila! There it was :).

First off, the Carnival Inspiration is a well-refurbished (2010) ship. It is clean and has lots of public rooms, both small and large, family-friendly and not-so-family-friendly. I don't think our cruise was full, as we felt relatively uncrowded, even on the "at sea" day. What kind of blew our minds, however, was that a 2000+ passenger ship had only one VERY SMALL pool. Overall, the deck-seating was plentiful (as opposed to Disney, where I felt we could never have found a seat or lounge chair at-sea or otherwise!) and there is a nice "Serenity" deck (9 aft) for adults only. The lobby elevators span 4 decks and looks pretty impressive, but we never once were able to catch one of the elevators there! Read more