At the last minute, my husband suggested we go on a cruise for our anniversary. Being diamond members of Royal Caribbean, I checked there first. We have never been to Cuba, so I decided to book the cruise since there didn't seem to be any offerings closer to our anniversary date. We have never departed from Tampa either. We were very pleased with our Tampa port experience, both embarking and departing. The ship is much smaller than any others we have been on. That was a plus when finding your way on-board ship. It also seemed to be a plus with the personalities of the crew members. Everyone was very nice, friendly and helpful. The negative involved the size of the cabin. I can only speak for ours. We got the only cabin not sold so I am sure that didn't help. The shower was very, very small, as was the room. It reminded us of our cruises years and years ago. We went up to the Windjammer the first day and also for breakfast the next day. We were very impressed with the large size of the shrimp cocktail at the lunch buffet. Wish I could say we were impressed with the "hot" food. The selections looked nice but the food was lukewarm, at best. The same cool temperature food was at the breakfast buffet the next morning so we skipped going up altogether and just went to the dining room, which was fine.

Cuba was interesting . I got very frustrated trying to get information about several of the tours. Only one mentioned air conditioned buses. Royal Caribbean needs to be more precise in their description wording. After 3 phone calls I finally had someone give me an email address pertaining to the excursions. Their answer came back to me the day before we were to leave, and not in enough time to book the tour we wanted. It turns out all the bus tours are air conditioned. We were also worried about exchanging money at Cuba's terminal. We wanted enough to purchase what we wanted but not too much since we would lose money turning it back into US dollars. It turned out this was not necessary at all. The rum/cigar shop didn't have a problem taking our money. The lady just got out her calculator and showed me what I owed. It matched what my husband had calculated. We were relieved since we knew we could not use our charge cards or ATM machines and knew we had to be careful which pesos we received as change. I don't know if the shops in their terminal exchanged that way but, if they didn't, the money exchange was right there. It was "interesting" to see our US dollar was only worth eighty-seven cents after their charges.

For the 4th of July we were very happy to see American flags draped everywhere and, at lunch by the pool, they served a huge cake decorated like the flag.