This was the 12th cruise for my husband and I both 41. We sailed with our kids age 16, 14, 12 and 9 (there 6th cruise) and both sets of grandparents who have cruised many times. We have been on a Voyager class ship before as we sailed the Mariner twice. Our ports of call were Aruba, Curacao, St Maarten and St Thomas.

Arrival: We flew nonstop Houston to San Juan the night before our cruise and stayed at the Embassy Suites Isla Verde. This turned out to be a good plan as Continental lost one of bags (the garment bag with all of our formal clothes) and it took us 24 hours to retrieve it. The Embassy Suites was nice and had a great cocktail hour as well as free breakfast with eggs, bacon etc. The only downside was that it was very noisy. When we arrived at 2 pm there were only King Bed rooms left and they were out of pillows and blankets. There was a live band and music was playing until very early into the morning.

Embarkation: We took a taxi at 11:15 to the port (we were able to get a van for the 6 of us for about $30 I think). When we arrived at the port it was a bit chaotic as there was no one "directing" guests where to go. There was a long line of people as the port was not open yet. We realized we needed to get luggage tags from the porter after standing in line with our luggage for about 15 minutes. Royal Caribbean could do a better job at crowd control here. The port employees were not very friendly. Disney does a much better job at embarkation but since we had cruised before it was not a big deal for us...we heard lots of other guests complaining though. We were on the ship by 12:15 or so. We purchased soda cards for all six of us right away then headed to the Windjammer. Read more