We travelled as a family group of 10 (all balcony cabins) from Vancouver. Prior to the cruise we had just finished an excellent Canadian Rockies trip from Calgary to Vancouver with great weather all through. We were all eagerly looking forward to the cruise as it would give us a chance to see some great sights in a relaxing environment. We had seen some awesome sights during the 8 day Rockies tour including beautiful Banff, world famous icefield parkway including snow coach trip on Columbia icefield, seeing lots of black bears and other wildlife on the way and ending the journey doing the mountain adventure from Jasper to Vancouver via Sunpeaks seeing the landscapes change and see more brilliant sights along the way. Despite all the excellent sightseeing, the tour was hectic as we had to change hotels most days except when we stayed 3 nights in Banff and 2 nights in Vancouver.

We got to Vancouver cruise terminal after 1pm and this was one of the worst embarkations I had seen. I have been on many cruises (in fact this was my 17th cruise) however this was the 1st cruise for most of my other family members. We had to first queue for around half an hour to go through security, then had to queue for 20mins or so for US immigration and finally had to queue for another half an hour or so to check in a the carnival desk and get our room key cards. So by the time we got into the ship, it was nearly 3pm.

This was my 2nd cruise on the Legend as I had sailed nearly 2 years ago to the Norwegian fjords from Dover. We were told that lunch was about to finish and as the ship was due to sail at 4pm, the safety drill was going to occur at 3.30pm. However I couldn't see how the ship could sail at 4pm as there were many more passengers behind us in the queue. However we still quickly dropped off our hand luggage in our staterooms and rushed to buffet upstairs for lunch. Like before, they had several different stations eg. Pizza station, sandwich station, salad station e.t.c. It was hard to find a table even at 3pm. After a quick lunch, I decided to look around the ship as I had heard that the ship had gone through some refurbishment. On the upper deck, a new water slide had been added and there were a few minor changes but nothing major. Also the interior parts of the ship, there didn't seem to be many changes either which disappointed me as the ship clearly looked tired and the refurbishment certainly hadn't helped much. Read more