First, I would say that overall, we enjoyed this cruise. The introduction referred to the "dark side" and that basically reflected the overall decor of the ship - very dark. We are from Toronto, Canada and drove to Baltimore 3 days early to see the sites before we set sail. One of the high lights of the trip was the beautiful fall foliage throughout northern Pennsylvania and New York. A second highlight, from my wife's point of view, was the huge Arundell Mills Outlet Mall in nearby Hanover, Maryland. That kept us busy for the better part of a day.

I would note that if you are arriving by car, Baltimore is the best cruise port on the eastern seaboard from the standpoint of highway access, processing of cars, size of the lot and proximity to the ship. In my opinion, New York City, Boston, Bayonne and Philadelphia would follow in that order. I wont dwell on the embarkation and debarkation process because we agree with all of the reviewers that Carnival handled it very well.

As I said earlier, this was our first Carnival cruise. We have avoided Carnival for many years because it apparently catered to a very young adult crowd and lots of children. We are in our late 60's and didn't think that we would enjoy that type of environment. We were wrong. The crowd represented many age groups. I understand that there were approximately 450 youngsters under the age of 18 but Carnival organized so many things for this age group that you really didn't notice them at all. We did notice, however, that the Carnival Baltimore crowd is far noisier than the Royal Caribbean Baltimore crowd. The Carnival crowd had a tendency to communicate with each other in very LOUD voices especially in the dining areas which was rather inconsiderate. Read more