My husband and I went on our first cruise 6 months ago on the Carnival Sensation - We were hooked! We planned to go on another this fall, but my husband recently broke his wrist and was out of work for 1 month. We realized that since he had to burn through his PTO before short-term disability kicked in, it was now or never (at least this year) to vacation! So I compared RC to Carnival, and even though Carnival had slightly better prices, this cruise was at the perfect time (Fri-Mon) So we booked it a mere 2 weeks in advance!

Embarkation was a breeze! We parked at Park-N-Cruise and was shuttled over to the Port. We arrived right around 11am and was on the boat eating lunch by 11:20! It was wonderful! The first thing we did when we boarded was go straight to the excursions desk and put our names down for a Cabana, which they said they would let us know by 7pm that night whether we were able to get one or not (they offer these to suite guests and past RC cruisers first). Then we walked up to the Winjammer for lunch. After lunch, we hit the pool, and although it was a bit crowded, we didn't have to search long to find pool chairs. We were originally told our room would be available around 1:30pm, but ended up having to wait until about 2:15pm. We saw our bags in the lobby of our deck, so just grabbed them and brought them to our room ourselves. We were on deck 3, nearly at the very back of the boat with an interior room. The room was very well cleaned and smelled pleasant. While there was a few areas that showed the boats age - The shower head was a bit rusted and the carpet and curtains around the bed were rather dated, we were still pleasantly surprised by the room. We couldn't help but compare everything to our first cruise with Carnival. This room had much more storage than our previous. It has 6 drawers at the vanity, as well has two medicine cabinet-type mirrors on the vanity, plus another cabinet that opens to reveal 3 more shelves, one of which holds the safe. In the closet there were 3 more drawers and shelves, and plenty of hanging clothes space. The bathroom had a medicine cabinet as well, and the shower housed plenty of shelf space for shampoos and such.

We had brought two bottles of wine on board with us - one white, one red. We wanted to enjoy the white wine that evening, so we looked out our door, and our room steward wasn't but a few feet away. We met Sheldon from Jamaica and asked him to bring us a bucket of ice and two glasses. He brought it back promptly and we put the bottle on ice, while we walked around and "discovered" the ship. Read more