This was our first cruise, and for a first cruise I must say that we now have very high expectations for the next one. We got to Tampa at 10am and we boarded the ship at around 12pm. Embarkation was a lot smoother than it looked, it went extremely fast. We got on the ship and looked around and got a bite to eat and then found our cabin. We sat in our cabin which was a great balcony room and waited for our luggage to come. My daughter's luggage was at our room at around 4pm which made her happy because she wanted to go in the pool but we could not go with her because there was only one piece of luggage there. After taking her to the pool for an hour and a half we went back to our cabin and my husband's luggage was there. By this time it was 6pm. We wanted to go eat at our early seating dinner in the dining room but I was not at all dressed to go to dinner so we continued to wait for out luggage. Finally at 8:30pm my suit case arrived. At this time I was really upset because we missed dinner and we were tired and hungry. We ended up going to the buffet to eat and then we went for drinks. We found out that neither of our sign and sail cards worked so we went to the pursers desk and it was supposedly fixed. We went back up to the lido deck for drinks and again our cards were not working. We didn't not start the trip off well with the annoyance of the bags showing up so sporadically and so late and the fact that the cards were not working and we had to go back and forth so many times. After all of this we asked about the camp carnival at the pursers desk and they seemed to know nothing because they sent us all over the ship, I ended up finding it all out on my own...

By day two I was miserable. The night before was hellish between the ignorance of the staff and the rocking of the boat, which was really horrible...yet the day seemed to get better and so did the rest of our trip. We had not one problem after this first day. We were able to get what we needed, treated well, and the ship was gorgeous. The ship was still rocking quite a bit until about the 3rd day but I had been told by many of the staff and people who had been on cruises in the past that it was exceptionally bad the first three days of this cruise and it's not always this bad. I tried to stay positive through out it all and dealt with it, and it was calm until the last day which helped out a lot. The ports of call were great as well...if you like the beach and shopping Cozumel and Costa Maya are the best ports. Grand Cayman was very interesting, and Belize left much to be desired...it was quite dangerous, we were approached to buy drugs at least 3 times and felt very unsafe, but we went on our excursion and straight back to our ship.

I would totally recommend this cruise. We made a lot of friends and had an amazing time all around!