I sailed on January 6 with the Adventure of the Seas. This was my first RCCL cruise, having only sailed once before on MSC in the Mediterranean. I sailed with a group of 8 including one 15 month old. Logistically it is challenging to keep a group of this size occupied and happy, but the Adventure of the Seas is a big enough boat that it delivers.

The itinerary was Southern Caribbean stopping in Aruba, Curacao, St. Maarten and St. Thomas. Having the cruise start in San Juan saves a day at sea in getting to Aruba. There are other itineraries on other ships that leave from Florida, but it takes two days to get to the deep south.

The one flaw of the cruise was embarkation. It was extremely time consuming, taking over two hours to board. We purposely avoided going to the pier at the every start of embarkation to avoid the crowd. But despite that, there were over 1000 people in line when we arrived. The process is compounded by the fact that over 3600 passengers sailed on our cruise. The embarkation process proved to the be the only major hiccup on our trip. Read more