While we arrived at the port at our designated time, we wound up standing in line for almost an hour before they began letting people through the metal detectors. After checking in, we had to wait a while before they began boarding. When we arrived onboard, we went to sign my kids up for the soda package, the process was a bit silly. I thought it could be taken care of at guest services but was informed I needed to go to a separate table nearby. There, they filled out a form indicating who the package was for, gave us a soda mug and told me to go back to guest services to finish the process - not really sure why this all couldn't have been done at guest services. Once that was taken care of we went to check out our room, which was all ready for us. Our cabin was fine - there was nothing wrong, nor anything special about it. Our biggest disappointment came when we went to the pool and found out that there is a kids pool and an adult pool, and that our teenager who is 5'10" needed to hang out at the kiddie pool.

We all thought the food was sub-par. The buffet was always mobbed, and there isn't enough space to walk around all the people clogging up the walkways. We made reservations for dinner every night, and we were very thankful for that because every night we heard people in front of us having what seemed like a minimum of a half an hour wait for the main dining rooms. If we arrived at dinner even 5 minutes early, we were made to wait those 5 minutes, even though our table was ready. At the main dining room for breakfast, we waited almost an hour for our food to be delivered to the table. The wait staff seemed as though they wanted to be more helpful, but it felt as though they had little to no training. An example of this was in O'sheehans, we ordered a Guinness. She brought us the can, that she had already opened. We asked for a glass and she brought us a plastic cup filled with ice.

We had a great time in port, and our shore excursions were mostly enjoyable, with the exception of when my mother broke her foot. They changed the excursion time for their scuba trip to later in the day and due to the change, they had to rush through the excursion, so everyone was rushing them to get back to the ship in time, when she got onto the smaller boat she slipped and broke her foot. We only found this out once we returned home on Sunday. I have been on Royal Caribbean, Princess, and Carnival. We have had enjoyable, and different, experiences on all three of these lines. This was our first and last time on a Norwegian cruise.