This was our first attempt at trying Carnival, my husband and I have went Royal Caribbean twice in the past but where pressed to go Carnival as we wanted to take our kids and also the fact of Royal not offering anything besides 7days out of N.O....:(

Was very pleased with the parking and how fast we went through check in and got on-board. This also was the last point I really was impressed. Having gone on the "floating cities" Royal offers, I had prepared myself for a smaller ship. I quickly was discouraged by the up-down of everything being on different floors and it took us a bit to find everything. We took the kids up to grab a bite to eat, again was shocked by the buffet or therefore lack of. Immediately I was not happy with the food and my older two (17 & 12) were too as they were expecting high end food.

We went to take a nap before leaving port and after waking everyone up to muster was again disappointing as some folks were late getting on-board and the muster time was backed up. This caused us to still be waiting for the drill while we left port and the kids did not get to see the ship pulling away. Read more