Infinity 4/17/05-5/1/05 14 night Panama Canal Eastbound

We are a couple from New Jersey aged 55 and 62 and have sailed well over a dozen times on Celebrity, Princess, NCL, RCCL & Disney, and this was our second cruise on the Infinity and our third on an M-Class ship. We have sailed on 3, 4, 7, 10 & 12 night cruises, but this was our first 14 night cruise. We were sailing with a group of 24 family & friends. We booked this sailing over a year and a half in advance to get a certain cabin and for the Itinerary which had sea days in between most of the port stops. Unhappily several months after booking they changed our departure port from San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico and dropped our Aruba stop substituting Jamaica and Grand Cayman, but we stayed with it. However, we were not happy about Celebrity charging us for the bus transfer to Ensenada!

We met our bus to Ensenada at San Diego airport at around 11AM where they loaded our luggage on a truck and after a 15-20 minute wait loaded us onto a nice bus. It was comforting to actually see your luggage placed into the truck. The 2 hour bus trip was not as bad as I had imagined, but a San Diego departure would have been much nicer. The buses all stopped at a Hotel in Mexico around 5 minutes from the ship where they did your check-in inside the hotel's large banquet room. It was efficient with laptops and passport scanners and we had our boarding/stateroom cards and were back on the bus in about 15 minutes. Upon arrival at the pier your bus load of guests passed through the scanners and was on the ship in minutes. Our sailing was delayed from 7PM until about 8:30PM due to some late arriving buses. (This delay did not affect our first port arrival time) Read more