My wife and I and our daughter just got back from the 9-night eastern Caribbean cruise out of Cape Liberty (Bayonne, NJ). We had cruised the eastern Caribbean two years ago on the Voyager of the Seas, which is the sister ship of the Explorer and has the same layout. This time we figured we'd visit different islands on basically the same great ship.

To begin with, the Explorer is in very good shape but the Voyager was better decorated in our opinion - a minor point. (The Explorer has two huge ugly aluminum foil looking decorations at the two ends of the mall that look pretty amateurish.) We had a balcony room that had two twin beds pushed together and a pull-down bunk over it for our daughter to sleep on. The room is slightly smaller than the one with the foldout couch that we had on the Voyager, but the central location of the room this time made up for it. It was nice being close to the elevators as we found ourselves returning to our room more often than we thought we would.

Boy, Royal Caribbean needs to put some money into their terminal at Bayonne, NJ. It is the same as it was two years ago - a bare bones operation inside a painted warehouse. Pretty shabby. The baggage handler we had was awful, leaving one of our suitcases teetering on top of a transport bin and about to fall off at the slightest movement. They just don't care. I had to rearrange the pile of suitcases, myself, in order to prevent any damage to mine. Check-in was easy and our number was called to board after only waiting about 45 minutes. Once on the Explorer, we headed to the Windjammer Cafe for a buffet lunch until our cabin was ready. Excursions: Read more