My husband and I were on the Explorer of the Seas for the October 12, 2007 sailing to New England and Canada. This was the second cruise for both of us. Our first was a Western Caribbean cruise on Carnival. I am 29 and my husband is 30. We took this trip to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. All and all we had a fantastic time and would recommend this cruise to others.
Embarkation: We flew from DTW to Newark and arrived at the airport at about 1pm. We got our luggage and headed out to the taxi stand. It was $50 to get to the port (which was based on both destination and the # of pieces of luggage we had). I thought this was a bit pricey but honestly we would not have saved any money doing transfers through Royal Caribbean. We got to the port and our luggage was whisked away and we headed inside to "check-in". The check-in process was pretty simple and went quickly, although I must comment that we had a very rude person check us in. We noticed he was a supervisor and thought it was odd but just looked past it and went on our merry way. We took the customary photo and headed to the shuttles. You have to take shuttles to actually get to the area where you board the ship. This went quickly and we were on the ship and eating lunch in the Windjammer in no time. Shortly thereafter we headed to our room and our luggage was already waiting for us.
As a side note . . . I would recommend being up on one of the outdoor decks when the ship sails out to sea. You get great views of NYC, the Statue of Liberty, etc. Unfortunately it was nightfall when we went under the Verrazano Bridge because someone on our ship fell ill and we had to return to port before we got under the bridge. The plus side of this was we got to see NYC all lit up at night, a very cool sight to see.