Myself, my sister and my daughter (ages 50, 44 and 20) just returned from the 9/17 - 9/27 Carnival Valor cruise to the Western Caribbean as the annual girls vacation. Let me preface this review by saying that this is my 7th cruise, and 6th with Carnival, so I'm not a 1st time cruiser and I've never had complaints about any previous cruises, mostly because I'm just happy to be away from work and it would need to be pretty bad for me to complain.

Being from Fort Lauderdale, I'm spoiled when it comes to cruises. Only had about a 40 minute ride to the Port of Miami on Sunday morning. Arrived approximately 11:30 am, and the embarkation process was the fastest I've ever experienced. We were on the ship, sitting in Rosie's restaurant with a drink in hand by 12:30. We wandered around the ship a bit, although all the CCL ships have basically the same layout, so we knew our way around. We got to our cabin around 2:00 pm, and lo and behold, all of our luggage was already there! This was awesome! We were totally unpacked in plenty of time to go back up on deck and have a couple more drinks prior to sailing!

We watched as the Carnival Miracle passed us by, and their ship's horn could be heard until they got out of the port. Funny, but I never heard the Valor horn at any time during the entire cruise. Thought maybe it was me, being that I was celebrating my 50th birthday and figured the hearing is the first to go, but after chatting with several other people, came to the conclusion that I think our horn was broke! Read more