We live within 90 minutes of Baltimore and the thought of flying our 3 year old daughter and 9 month old son somewhere to get on a ship seemed a fruitless exercise of spending lots of extra money to lug around massive amounts of luggage. I just wish RCL and Carnival would put more than just one of their older/smaller ships out of Baltimore to increase options. I understand the business decision based on the captive and smaller audience, but since we took a similar itinerary two years ago on the Enchantment of the Seas which is essentially the same ship, this trip was a compromise to have an easy getaway with the kids. In fact, 11 other family members chose to accompany us and more than one has asked about taking another RCL cruise soon.

The ship is small compared to the new megaships, but I since the biggest/newest ship I ever was on was NCL Dawn in 2003 I cannot complain like my last cruise was on Quantum of the Seas. The main selling point of this ship besides the local departure port is that RCL has nurseries on board for kids under 3, which I believe Disney may be the only other. We ended up only using this one night for a few hours to have an adult dinner since other times family could step in, but having the option as a travelling couple to take an active sport shore excursion or find alone time is important. They seemed capable and you can check out bags of toys to play with in your room as well. My 3 year old daughter was fine with the kids club and they give a pager if there is any issues.

The interior rooms were tiny, a pack-n-play added to the floor space left a literal foot wide path to get through to the bed. We generally go with cheaper room options since we spend little time beyond sleeping in the room and with kids needing to nap the pitch black is a good thing. Water pressure in the tiny shower was amazingly strong though, but during the last two days it could take several minutes for the toilet to flush after pressing the button. Read more