We bought plane tickets to Orlando from Green Bay, WI to take a nice relaxing warm vacation. Since we have done the Disney thing we were looking for something to do the week we came to Florida so we started looking into a 4-5 day cruise. I did a lot of research on reviews and destinations between the various cruise lines. Even though Carnival was getting a lot of bad press we chose to go on the Carnival Sensation from Port Canaveral.

I booked an oceanview room on the Empress deck online for $289 person, found a great rate at the Comfort Suites (McCoy Rd) in Orlando for Saturday night as our cruise left on Sunday. We rented a car from Budget for the week using a coupon I received a discount rate of $109 for a Chevy Cruze, booked parking at the Raddison near Port Canaveral for $6 daily. We did not have any issues with the service, as we pulled in they had a shuttle that was filling up and they actually unloaded our luggage and had us park our car and register while the shuttle waited for us. After the cruise another shuttle was waiting to fill up and we were lucky enough to get on that as well with minimal waiting so we were very pleased with that service.

The cruise itself was both of our first experience and we had a blast! The weather was awesome, food was good and there were plenty of options for food. We did eat in the assigned dining room on two occasions and one of the other couples was also on their first cruise as well, we started talking about how they chose this cruise and they said that they saw some negative reviews but they realized that there are a lot of haters and hard to please people. We agree, this trip exceeded our expectations, the staff was friendly and helpful, Raymus and "K-man" to name a few---we did not get the names of the room attendants but they did a great job. The other couples at our table had several Carnival cruises under their belts and had nothing negative to say. Read more