First, I want to start out by saying that my husband and I have never been on a cruise ship before so we were extremely nervous about the experience. I also want to let people know that we are part of a younger age group. I am 24 and my husband is 23. Since we have never cruised before, we had nothing to compare this experience to. Other couples or travelers have been on different cruise ships; therefore, they compare the different cruise lines to one another. We are strictly rating Carnival on our first and "only" cruise experience. This will make a difference to people who want to know which cruise line is better than others.
We booked a cruise on Carnival's Victory Ship with an itinerary to the eastern Caribbean. We went from January 26th through February 2nd. This was a honeymoon trip for us. We were set to visit San Juan, Puerto Rico, St. Martin (French and Dutch Virgin Islands), and St. Thomas (U.S. Virgin Island). I think January was the perfect time to go. We had read cruise reviews that mentioned a lot of children/teenagers were aboard Carnival ships. We were pleasantly surprised to find that there were only a handful of small children, and the teenagers were hardly noticeable. We didn't run into this problem at all. Second semester must have just started for most children because we honestly didn't think there were many children aboard this vessel.
My husband and I took a flight down the day before the cruise left the port of Miami. We wanted to make sure we had enough time to get to where we needed to go, and we didn't want to be stuck without a refund if weather delayed our flight. I was extremely glad we did this. We were able to shop, eat dinner, and spend one night in Miami. We also stayed in a hotel that provided a free shuttle service to the port. This was nice because we didn't have to pay a taxi. Money becomes precious when you are on a cruise :) The only problem we had with the shuttle service was that there was only two shuttle vans to take you to the port, and they only fit about 12 people each time. Needless to say, we had to wait outside for the shuttles to come back and pick up another group of people. At least the weather was nice, and hey they are free shuttles so we didn't complain too much.