Background Information My wife and I were looking for a longer cruise for our second cruise. We had previously cruised Carnival for five days from New York on the Canadian itinerary and were happy with pretty much everything. We had previously been to the Caribbean only once, spending a week in St. Maarten in 1998, so we decided on an itinerary that would take us back there. As we own a time share, we are members of an exchange group that allows us to exchange our vacation weeks, so we used the RCI exchange service to exchange for a cruise. Doing this we were able to get an 8E for about $600 less than the then-rack rate for a 8A, which was a pretty good deal as far as we were concerned. We flew American Airlines from Washington Reagan to Miami the morning before the cruise.

Hotel Info I hate staying in big cities, and Miami was insanely expensive that week for some reason. There's also the fact that I love the Florida Keys and they're so close to Miami... so we picked up a rental at the Miami airport and drove about an hour south to Key Largo. Had dinner on the water at Alabama Jacks in Card Sound and spent the night at the Holiday Inn Key Largo.

Travel To Port of Embarkation Left Key Largo around 10:00 on Saturday morning and drove back to the National car rental return at MIA. We asked National for a cab to the pier, but the courtesy driver at National was kind enough to run us over to Alamo where there was a free shuttle to the pier. We arrived at the pier around noon. It took less than 15 minutes for us to drop off our bags, clear security, get our Sail & Sign cards and be ON the ship. Carnival's "Fun Pass" system is completely electronic, so it is not necessary to print one out to take with you, but it turned out to be a good idea because the folks running the lines at the terminal had a separate line for people with hard copy fun passes that allowed us to circumvent the entire line of people without them. Strongly recommend you take a hard copy, even though you don't require one. Read more