We booked this cruise for spring break and to get away together, as our first vacation together. We are in our early 20's and we were looking for lots of partying under the sun and night sky. This cruise didn't really give us much of that, but we still had fun. What I have learned from this cruise is that the ports of call really don't matter much unless you are on the ship to buy things tax and duty free. You don't have much time in any of the ports. We did 3 shore excursions in total from the four island we visited.

To get to NYC Cruise Terminal, we drove to the train station, took the LIRR into NYC a day early and stayed at a hotel for the night. In the morning at about 10:30am, we took a taxi to Pier 88. We were there by like 11ish, but we were not the first ones to be there. You drop your luggage right in the beginning of the cruise terminal on the street, which makes you second guess yourself, because there are no signs saying this is where you drop it. You walk through security with your tickets and passport and then wait in line in our to get your freestyle card which is your EVERYTHING on this boat. This is your charge card; everything you purchase on board goes to your stateroom with whatever way you linked the payment to the stateroom. We linked a credit card because it was easiest. Then after that, you wait until the number you have been given has been called for you to get on the ship. Once on the ship, we explored and immediately went to the bar. We left port at about 4pm, so at 3pm, we went up to deck 13 with two chairs and sat there was we departed NYC. We had a great view of the Statue of Liberty.

Like I said, the overall trip was a lot of fun, but one concern I had is the service in the dining rooms. We had dinner appointments every single night (made reservations a month before our trip for various restaurants) but it took about an hour and a half for the complete dining experience. To me, that just seemed like too long. We would sit down and someone would bring over bread and water at every single restaurant the second you sat down. I filled up on bread all the time, because between them giving you bread and then coming back to actually take your order was about 20 minutes. I am not a patient person at all so that ticked me off. When you ordered a drink from the bar, that took about 30 minutes because none of the restaurants we dined in had its own bar, and the server had to go out of the restaurant to actually get the drink leaving everyone else behind. Now at every restaurant, we also had multiple servers and I never could remember who was the actual one I should talk to to meet my needs. Read more