My wife and I just returned from the 9/1/07 Labor Day weekend "Cruise to No Where" from NYC and had a very positive experience. We booked this short get away cruise to celebrate our 15th Wedding Anniversary without our kids (ages 7 and 9). This was our 7th cruise (2nd with NCL, 2 w/Princess, 3 w/Carnival) and our first cruise to No Where. You can bet that it won't be our last. We had read all the reader reviews about the Dawn, but found the one written by Cruise Critic's editor, Carolyn Spencer Brown (7/03/2007) "My Cruise to Nowhere on Norwegian Spirit" to be the most helpful in preparing for this one-night experience.
The weather was a beautiful 80 degrees, partly cloudy, summer sunny afternoon. We arrived at the port at 12:00 p.m., parked our car on the pier roof top parking lot ($25.00) and were on the ship by 12:30 p.m. The embarkation process was orderly and organized. Once on board, we headed to Salsa, one of the ship's restaurants, to review the menus of all other the restaurants and to make our dinner reservation. Based on all of the positive reviews that we had read, we booked a 6:00 p.m. dinner reservation in Le Bistro (extra fee of $15 per person). Since NCL does not allow passengers to go to their rooms until 2:00 p.m., we lugged our overnight bag down to the Venetian for a very lovely sit-down lunch experience. The Venetian is one of the ship's main dining rooms that were actually open for lunch - very unusual compared to any of our other cruise experiences where only a "buffet" lunch is served. A lovely female waiter team (Romanian and Yugoslavian) provided us with a very cheerful and pleasant experience. After our delicious lunch, we checked out the two other dining choices and concluded that we had made the right choice for lunch.
At 2:00 p.m. we went to our balcony room (#10026) to quickly unpack and change into our bathing suits. The beautifully decorated cabin was much smaller than what we had experienced on Carnival and Princess; the storage space was adequate, but not generous. The bathroom was very unique in that it was a three-part design -- the shower and toilet areas are equipped with sliding glass privacy doors to allow multiple users at one time. There was also a mini-fridge that was empty, so we filled it with our bottle of white wine that we had packed in our overnight bag. We spent a lot of time on our balcony and highly recommend same for the one-night experience.