We've cruised twice (2004 and 2005) with NCL on the Crown which was the smallest oldest NCL ship, and which has now been sold. We really enjoyed those cruises including Freestyle. Since then we've had back to back cruises on HAL (which we liked) and a repositioning cruise on Grandeur of the Seas (RCCL) which was Nov 25th to Dec 8th. We visited our grandchildren in Miami in the interval between the Royal Caribbean cruise and the NCL cruise.

After our experience on Grandeur of the Seas where my husband said, as we were getting ready to disembark, that he was never going cruising again, I was hoping that the Pearl would change his mind about never cruising again. And the Pearl cruise was really much better than GOTS cruise in a lot of respects. Unfortunately, it was also a large ship and was packed with people because it WAS the holidays, and my husband just doesn't like the big ships and a lot of people and standing in line. But he wasn't negative about the Pearl the way he was about RCI.

We rented a car in Tampa after the GOTS cruise so we dropped the bags off at the port, and then drove to the car return area of the company we rented from (Dollar/Thrifty) near the airport. Dollar had a free shuttle to the port which is something to remember if you are cruising out of Miami. We got to the port about 11. Read more