Boarding the ship with our friends was quick and uneventful. We got there at 1pm but weren't leaving until 5pm. We settled into our adjoining cabins with the dirty windows that never got cleaned, then decided to have lunch onboard ship. When we got to the deck with the food, I thought I was in an elementary school cafeteria. It took over 20 minutes to get through the buffet line - mainly due to all the kids. During the rest of the trip, I learned the difference between Carnival and Norwegian - which we took to Bermuda last year. Norwegian had cruise directors who had lots of activities to keep the kids busy. Carnival's idea of keeping the kids busy is to let them run around like banshees, monopolize the adults only pool, use the ice cream machines as a street corner hangout, and allow the older kids to block the narrow deck stairways. I felt like I was in a housing project. I was also dumbfounded to learn that the buffet food stations were closed down to coincide with everyone's return from shore excursions. For example, they closed down most of the food stations at 3:30pm. You had to be back on the ship by 4:30pm. If you were hungry, your only choices were hamburgers, lousy pizza, and their so-called New York deli. At one point we were on line at a Mexican food buffet when the guy behind the counter said they were closed and pulled away a pan as a lady was trying to get some food out of it. For one of the shore excursions, we booked a "photography tour". The big sights we were taken to see were an old fort we couldn't enter, the rapids in front of a paper mill, a park/cemetery, and a marketplace. It's beyond me WHY St. John and Halifax are cruise destinations - there's absolutely nothing to see. My best pictures were of the New York City skyline as we were leaving port.I should have just taken the Staten Island Ferry cruise...