This was my 8th cruise and my 4th on RCI. The cruise was an 8 day Mexico cruise, October 13-21, 2007. The ship was chartered by Atlantis Events for the cruise.

My partner and I arrived the evening before the cruise and stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel just a few blocks from the cruise terminal in LA. The total price for a 1 bedroom suite with a view was $265 USD including breakfast in the morning. I would recommend staying there. It was very convenient. We even got to see the ships dock in the morning. That got me really excited.

We took the free shuttle from the hotel to the cruise terminal and arrived at 11:30am. They hadn't started checking in people yet, so we were given a number and told to wait. About 20 minutes later they opened check-in and started calling the numbers in order for people to queue up. After we checked in, we had to wait in another area before they started boarding. They started boarding around 1:30pm and called numbers 1-5. We were number 6. We waited for another half hour and they didn't call any more numbers! We went up, and apparently all numbers were boarding. It was a bit of a mess. We weren't actually on the ship until after 2pm, so it was a lot of waiting around. It could have been a lot better organized. Read more