My wife and I had our 25th anniversary celebration in April and after extensive web searching we always came back to sailing again on a Carnival cruise as the best vacation that we knew of and we could be sure of having a fantastic time. So now all we had to do was decide on the ship. We had gone to St. Maarten in Dec on the Triumph and decided we would really like going back so that narrowed down our search and we then selected the Valor as our ship of choice this time. We drove to Miami from North Georgia a day early so we could lay out at the pool to get in the mood for the cruise and were shocked by the room prices, a $140.00 for a regular room. I stopped at about 8 hotels with the same room rate more or less and decided to drive a little bit North and the rooms dropped back down to the $75.00 a night range. I just hate to spend $300 to sleep for a total of 14 hours, oh well enough whining. We got to the port at 11:30 and were shocked by the lack of people. I drove to lot E paid my $140.00 to park and we just walked right on board. We were on the lido deck eating in less than 30 minutes. This was the best embarkation we have ever had. The first impression of the ship was very good. The deck layout was similar to the Triumph and the newly installed huge deck TV was great, so we ate at Rosie's on the Lido deck and drank boat drinks and laid in the sun till the cabin was ready. We had cabin 7244 inside on the empress deck and the cabin was extremely nice, with tons of storage and a large bathroom. We met our cabin steward but I am sorry but I have forgotten his name, but he did a great job of keeping an extra bucket of ice 3 days so I could keep my champagne cold. I ordered the anniversary package for the Bon Voyage department off of the web page and also the hanging decorations, both were well worth the money and my wife loved them. Overall the food on the ship was very good, the sushi and the fish and chips were fantastic and I had the fish and chips just about every day for lunch. We did not eat at Scarlett's but ate the evening meals at the Washington dining room. The staff was once again great and did a good job of making us feel special. The food was good and they didn't mind bringing you another serving of something you liked, just let them know and it was to the table in a minute or so. The shows were as good as some I have seen in Las Vegas so I highly recommend them, except we didn't do the legends one on the last night because I hate karaoke..lol The disembarkation was as smooth getting off of the boast as it was getting on, took us about 30 minutes tops.

Overall I would rate the Valor a 5 of 5. The entire ship was spotless; it has a great crew, nice rooms, good food, good entertainment, shopping, and ports of call. A fantastic vacation awaits you if you cruise on this ship.